Yes it's really silly when you have to contact the call centre. Not sure where it is located in the world - somewhere in Asia I think - but the "lies" to get a customer with anything resembling a complaint or issue off the phone / transferred / cut off is not acceptable.
I wonder who at Virgin Media made the decision to go this route. I expect a Finance person because the labour will almost certainly be cheaper there.
Of course, there are plenty of other companies who use out-sourced call centres with positive results. But there is an endemic issue with Virgin Media's process when an issue is 'off-script', and the escalation process seems non-existent.
For sure use a call centre to triage calls in the first instance, but make sure there is a local (UK in our case) escalation 'customer care' team which I'm sure would resolve 95% of our issues here.