I'm sure you're right.
On the topic of "consequences", I think that there's a couple of factors at play that mean the company don't believe there's any meaningful commercial consequences. Hitherto, VM were the only high speed game in town for most customers, so many customers would in fact tolerate the poor service. As FTTP gains ground that won't apply if there's viable competing high speed offers but it'll be a long time before there's a big overlap of VM and OR FTTP footprints, so I suspect this remains true. You might have a miserable, many-hours long phone marathon to get a fault fixed, but many customers will still prefer VM's speed advantage of whatever VDSL options exist.
The second factor is that VM operate a high churn business model. So (from previous investor announcements) around 12-18% of customer cancel each year, and VM operate a huge marketing effort in the region of £150-200m a year to replace the churn-out. With a management mind set that is sales and marketing led (with no real customer service culture at all), the attitude will be "if we lose too many customers we'll just put up some shiney incentives to boost sign up" - hence the offer of a "free" 43 inch UHD TV late last year, and other similarly generous offers.
It'll be interesting to see if there's any difference between ISPs in the Ofcom complaints data which gets published tomorrow. That'll primarily reflect Lockdown Mk1 rather than VM's performance since then, but my experience has been that although all companies have been affected, some have managed a whole lot better than others. VM's ongoing refusal to offer support and customer service by email is an obvious example of something that could have harmed its relative performance, but if other large ISPs performed badly too, then maybe it'll be the usual story of VM bouncing along, not the worst, but persistently below average for the sector.
If VM moved as much customer service as possible to email (appreciate that you can't for faults where the service isn't working at all) that would enable most people to avoid the misery of the current telephone "experience", and if they enabled full management of customer accounts online, that would further reduce costs and staffing requirements (and reduce the incidence of misselling and inaccurate contracts). These things aren't difficult, other companies do them some of them very well, but VM management seem surgically bonded to a 1990s service delivery model dreamt up by management consultants who never had to live with the consequences.
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