Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Is anyone having to reboot their router/modem regularly with Virgin Broadband? We're having to do it at least once a day. I think it may be a problem with their servers locally so if I notice a disconnect I will post the time on here, I would appreciate if others could do the same.

Tags for Forum Posts: broadband, consumer complaints, virgin media

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Apparently, they're very responsive on their twitter stream.
Malcolm B, agree with your feelings on the matter of VM. Have had sporadic line drop over the last few weeks with broadband.

When a salesman told me a couple of years back that Virgin had bought NTL my response was ..... 'Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!' He laughed. Service has gone from NTL always good to Virgin maybe. Still, if your cable connection works it's the fastest connection in the country by far.

Btw, for all concerned, the Virgin 'engineers' get a very raw deal with their remuneration package so don't have a go at them. It's the Virgin bosses you need to aim your frustrations at. David T might be onto something if this 'CEO office contact' is to be believed, but remember, everything needs to be done in writing (not just phone calls).
An update:- On Friday I had a call from someone who described himself as being from the CEO's office. He also promised action. He denied that it was common practice for tech not to turn up without telling the customer, and when I assured him that it was - and that this had been confirmed by the bloke in the complaints department undertook to look into it.

Why am I not surprised that I have heard nothing from anyone since? I will chase them this PM.

Debbie & Malcolm - your problems will be passed on.

Re the monitoring I have been doing - these utilities monitor the system constantly, and reveal the occasions when the system goes down for short periods, which might otherwise not be noticed. If folks would like to try these out it might give us more ammunition.
Many thanks David T.
I'm disappointed that my ire with Virgin Media is what's prompted my first post on the forum, but hey! Needs must. I'm not normally this angry :-)

Just wanted to throw in my two penneth. We've had an absolute nightmare with our Virgin TV since moving in to Hampden Road at the beginning of June. We had faultless service for approximately two weeks after which we lost the vast majority of our channels, lost our on demand function and our V+ box stopped recording programmes successfully.

We booked an engineer visit to review the situation who attended told us we needed a 'Cabling Engineer' to replace the cables from the street to the property. This was duly booked. My flatmate worked from home for the day only to have the engineer not turn up; upon phoning, we were told Virgin had no record of this being booked on the system!

We were told to send a complaint email which we did. Two weeks later we were assigned a 'Resolutions Manager' to deal with our issue personally. She never answered her phone or returned our calls so a further email was sent to the complaints department detailing our woes. When we were both on holiday two weeks later, my flatmate received a phone call from an irate Virgin engineer who said he was outside the property and nobody was there to give him access. Of course we had not been informed of this appointment and it was a complete surprise to us!

Upon returning from holiday, we sent another long email to Virgin demanding action. 2 weeks passed so last night we phoned their ever-useless call centre once again (30 minute queue to speak to a person). The lady apologised that our complaint had passed their '2 week' aim for attention with such matters (it's been 3 months!) and that an engineer would be booked to come to us on Saturday morning. Given that an engineer has already attended and said we need a 'Cabling Engineer' we requested one of them to visit....surprise surprise, we were told a Cabling Engineer cannot be authorised until an ordinary engineer has looked at the problem again. What a faff!

So the appointment is booked for Saturday morning.....we wait with baited breath to see if they even turn up!

One thing I would say is that we have had great success in not paying for our Virgin service since July now. The people on the ends of the phone at the call centre can give an instant credit of £30, a higher credit needs to go to a team leader. But if you ask it to be escalated that does seem to get done. So my advice to anyone else on this thread would be to refuse to pay for the service until it is satisfactory..!

Joe
Some trawling of the VM support forums suggests that the way to get a response from someone competent at VM is to go over their heads, straight to the (self)regulator, the ISPA:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Fibre-optic-broadband-cable/Bro...
Malcom B. this is what i get when i go to your link, ''The page you are trying to access was not found. Please check your URL for typos and try again''.
Hmm. Works fine for me. How about this? http://bit.ly/asKNWa
"someone competent at VM" - now there's a new concept!
I have finally had a definitive response from an individual in the CEO's complaints office, and feel that I have been firmly put in my place.

He called me this morning, and during a long call let me know that

1. He was not interested in the fact that many people around here are having problems with the service.

2. As far as he was concerned there is nothing wrong with the TV service and the pixillation I have been getting on TVOD is normal.

3. He considers that it is perfectly acceptable that the set top box has to be disconnected from the power supply to unfreeze it. He was unconcerned that there may be disabled people who find this difficult or impossible.

4. He considers that regular loss of service on broadband is perfectly acceptable and is in accordance with the conditions of service.

5. (and this is the really good one) If they decide not to keep an appointment for a tech to call they will only tell the customer by text to their mobile. But they only have your mobile number if you have specifically given it to them (even if it is a Virgin mobile!). He didn't give a toss about the few people left who do not have mobiles.

6. If I didn't like it I could go elsewhere.

Given his address & designation I must assume that he is close to senior management and that his attitude reflects company policy.

At least we know where we are now!

The arrogance of this company simply beggars belief.

A copy of the email is attached - it contains full contact details if other members wish to make their views known.
Attachments:
If the connection did not drop occasionally then we would be able to run a "service" from our homes such as a personal drop-box or HarringayOnline. Virgin do not want that.

On the other hand, what a nasty little oick. He knows our only real alternative is Sky and is determined to behave only slightly better than King Rupert himself.

BTW, I have had pretty much NO issues since I went through the ridiculous charade of arranging a series of engineer visits before they finally agreed to up the power levels to my house (which costs them money to do).
Interesting. Ken is probably this guy's real name, but don't assume he is necessarily a permanent employee of VM. I note his job title ("Chief Executive Office – Customer Complaints") sounds generic and I thought that the content of his email to you was somewhat generic also. Did he know any engineering detail, I wonder?

Are you aware that Customer Complaints handling has in the last few years now grown to be a separate industry by itself?

Big corporations, especially financial services, are now partly or largely serviced for complaint handling by agencies who supply freelancers who have some skills in this field. I have some personal knowledge of this.

I regard the growing Complaints industry as a partly a symptom of failure of those big corporations to get things done right in the first place; partly a belief that the complaining is only a temporary period (justifying the high cost of contracted complaints handing as a variable overhead) and beyond that, partly a failure to learn lessons ("internalize") from direct contact with customers, that might be beneficial to the corporation in the long run.

I wouldn't be surprised if Ken was not a VM employee. Whether he was or not, he should have left you feeling that at least your complaint had been considered seriously.

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