Call centre staff and upgrades
I have had a number of missed calls from Virgin Media recently, but I answered the most recent one. They say they want to analyse my usage to offer me the best package for my needs, and said my area had recently been upgraded for Gigabit and that they recommend that for my single person household who doesn't game or watch streaming video much. Obviously they didn't mention the cost until I asked - they said it would be an extra £9 a month. I get a discounted rate at the moment. I also know that Gigabit has been available un my area for some time. Looking at Think Broadband, Virgin Media are offering Gigabit in my area for about £5/month more than I am paying now. Why would VM's call centre call me out of the blue to offer an upgrade I clearly don't need and for a much higher price than expected? And why would they say that Gigabit is a new service for my area?
Shady tactics and lies - avoid
I write this in hope someone will read in the future and spare themselves the experience of opening an account with Virgin. I had the terrible idea of signing up woth them. I spoke with a salesman who assured the contract was full fibre. When the contract came, the wording on it were for hybrid broadband. I called back immediately to cancel and a very rude employee called John Paul told me that I couldn't cancel my account because it wasn't in the system yet. I managed to speak with the salesman again, who revealed he wasn't really sure about hybrid vs full fibre and offered to send an engineer the day after. I agreed. The engineer never showed up. When I called them back, I learned the engineer appointment was mysteriously cancelled without notification (they couldn't tell me by whom or why of course), so I had spent the whole Saturday morning waiting for the engineer for nothing. I finally was able to cancel (which is very hard to do, they keep making excuses) but of course my O2 account, part of the package, that was opened by the Virgin Media saleaman, needed to be cancelled separately, so another 1/2 hour of phone call, verification, explanation etc. On the phone service, it's almost impossible to speak to a human operator: the only way is saying that you're thinking of cancelling, they'll put you through the retention team who can't do anything, but they'll eventually transfer you to the other teams. Even getting there is hard: the voice password system doesn't work, and you have to dial in your password after 3 attempts. Imagine an old person trying to cancel or fix something, they'll never be able. Obviously there is no option for "the engineer never showed up", and if you select the wrong option you will descend into robocall help until they tell you to go to the website and hang up. All operators are from Asian countries, thick accents, hard to understand. A scam, hopefully the regulator looks into those shady practices.