Dear Mr Dodds,
Over the past 8 weeks I have spent 10-20 hours speaking to multiple Virgin Media representatives on the phone and via the chat system. I have repeatedly heard how important customer service is to Virgin Media. As a long standing customer I want to make it clear how far your team is falling short of even basic standards of customer service.
Indeed, my experience over the past 6-8 weeks with Virgin Media has been the worst I’ve ever had as a consumer. If I held shares in Virgin Media I would be selling them as soon as possible. You have spent billions of pounds installing cable across the UK, but have customer service and installation teams that are woefully inadequate. I work for a large multinational as a VP managing a global team. If my staff (and the processes and systems they used) were as poor as yours are, I’d want to know about it. So please consider this message as “feedback is a gift”.
My family and I moved into our new house on August 30 and were due to have VM installed on September 1. Since then the installation date has been repeatedly moved by 2 weeks because the installation team are struggling to get a council permit for the work that’s needed. That’s incredibly inconvenient from my perspective, since I’m having to do video calls tethered to a phone while working from home, but that’s not the main reason I’m writing this message. The delays have been frustrating, but it’s the interactions with the Virgin Media team that have driven me to distraction.
I suspect I have interacted with your customer services and pre-installation teams more than you have, so here are the main problems as I see them:
There’s no such thing as an account manager. No one has taken responsibility for making sure that I have been kept informed as to the reasons behind the delays. Indeed, the default position is to read out some autotext and then transfer the customer to another department. I have been repeatedly told that I can expect a follow up call, which never comes, or someone rings and doesn’t leave a message. I’ve been transferred to another department and then cut off multiple times. It’s not the staff that are bad — it’s the systems and processes that they have to operate in that need a radical overhaul. Above all, the teams need to be proactively sorting out problems and giving customers regular updates. There is zero accountability within the teams, which act passively rather than actively.
Your staff are unwilling to pass on difficult messages. I have been repeatedly told that everything will be OK and that my broadband and TV connection will “definitely happen on [date]”. There’s an unwillingness to be open and transparent with customers. Everyone falls back on reading their standard script and offers profuse apologies about how they empathise with my experience. I need facts and explanations, not scripted platitudes (I know they’re scripted because during each interaction I hear exactly the same thing).
Every team uses different systems. Every time I call I have to go through security multiple times, as I get passed from one department to another. Keeping your customers’ data secure is clearly a top priority, but as I customer I feel like I am speaking to multiple companies, not one company. It’s incredibly frustrating having to spend 10 minutes going through security and telling my story of woe to one department, only to have to go through the whole process again when I’m transferred to one of their colleagues.
I am also an O2 customer and my experience with them has been better. Hopefully you will be able to leverage the O2 capabilities to improve things at Virgin Media, because, based on my experience, you have a serious problem within the Virgin Media customer services and installation groups.
