@jem101 Unusually optimistic for you Andrew!
Alright, poetic licence! In this help forum we don't see the thousands of customer service requests that get fixed first time. I'll say it again, when the service works it is excellent, the majority of customers have no cause for complaint, and the staff in this forum do a great job of helping customers.
The company however lets itself down because it is simply focused on sales and marketing to the expense of all else, and despite having metrics on customer service it simply doesn't understand the concept of good service (hence the poor telephony experience, or the miserable communication around pre-install or utilisation faults). To avoid Ofcom criticism of average response times, calls are on average picked up in a few minutes, but then routinely passed around, fobbed off, disconnected, or made to wait in secondary call queues. Or as another example, the company fishing for positive reviews on Trustpilot. If you look at the Trustpilot "transparency" details you can see how VM did a pilot in March, thought that a great success, and seem to have been doing this routinely since June (message to VM - you thought nobody would notice? Ha!). That action has greatly improved the average score and very quickly, but now shows ten times as many poor reviews each month as before they started trying to manipulate the scores. The company use sampled Net Promoter Score where customers get invited to give a rating from a sample that is inherently biased towards successful outcomes, and then prattle in investor communications about "best ever customer service". That's what success looks like for VM, rather than listening to the stories of poor customer experience, and changing the corporate attitudes, processes, systems and people to give better service.
I spend a third as much on car insurance as I do with VM, yet my insurer (big shout for Privilege Insurance here) have fast call response times, are quick and efficient in handling calls, they have good online account management capabilities, and their UK staff are friendly, professional, helpful and well trained. Obviously every customer needs to consider the premium they'd be quoted, and they won't always be best value for everybody but I'd give Privilege an unqualified recommendation. Don't get me wrong, things can go wrong at Privilege - but getting them put right is a quick and pleasant experience. None of those are the sort of words normally associated with Virgin Media.
Glad to get that off my chest.
