Virgin Media Customer Service- Your Personal Experience

[irishguymcr]

My experience is that as a long term VM customer I am so fed up speaking to idiots off shore that I have no confidence in these people anymore and if VM can't sort this out they are going to end up losing a lot of customers. There are enough call centres in the UK and Ireland which offer fantastic services and I don't see the point in farming services out to India anymore where customers get no form of service anymore.

I worked in the past for an outsourcing company in Ireland where we supported the likes of Microsoft, Dell, HP and many other companies and we were constantly measured on our results by the companies we supported and in the five years I was there we never lost one contract due to a very high customer experience.

I have been told in the past that VM are not happy with the Indian call centres but were under contract with them due to NTL having signed a contract with them, well I hope their contract finishes soon and if not VM should break it due to the total lack of customer service and care that we as customers get from offshore.

It is time that we as customers and companies started supporting employment in the UK call centres, both internal and outsourced, instead of giving all the work to offshore call centres.

What is the point of VM winning awards for Broadband and having the best VOD service and even now introducing HD TV when their customers are becoming more and more unhappy about contacting them. All VM are doing is making it harder for the retentions teams to keep customers and stopping them leaving for SKY and other companies.

[m419]

If I was to leave Virgin Media for being less than happy with the service, Sky is definately not on my mind, I think Sky are crap, a complete waste of money and complete waste of time, poor customer service,dumb ass channels and poor broadband!

I'd rather speak to someone in india than the thicko's over here like the T-Mobile call centre, I have never spoke to someone so retarded in all my life! I phoned up to find out how much it costs to call freephone numbers from pay monthly phones because the website doesn't give an actual price either, it took this woman 15 minutes to find out, she was brambling on and asking irrelevent questions and in the end she gave me wrong info! She said it would cost 10p per minute when in fact it came to 40p per minute and the 20 minute call cost me £8 on top of my monthly bill,

T-Mobile UK call centre is just retarded, hope they do outsource to the philipines!!!

[lawe]

I have nothing but praise for the people at VM!

OK, sometimes the line quality to India is not the best but on every occasion I have had to speak to them, this includes today, they have been polite, helpful and are willing to please.
I did have some billing issues a couple of months back, but this was sorted out way quicker than I thought it would be.

Now if you ask me about Three Mobile....

[m419]

Really, i've found 3 to be one of the best networks out of all of them, Virgin is good too.

By the way for those who had issues with network coverage on 3, there network is going to be completed by 2010, also the 2G coverage is provided by orange so if you ever go out of 3G range, you will still be able to make and recieve calls and text as well as surf the net and send and recieve pictures.

To be honest if you want decent mobile broadband and want to make and recieve video calls and use mobile tv as well as streaming such as You Tube, then the best 3G network is 3. O2 rolls in as the worst as there 3G network only covers around 60% of the population which is bad, 3's 3G network covers 92% and they are going to cover approx 98% by 2010 which means nearly 100% coverage.

I also heard that 3 might bid for T-Mobile which will be good as then the two 3G networks can be merged giving the UK higher 3G coverage as well as there own 2G network, that way they won't have to pay orange for the use of there network saving us money!

[Russ]

Back on-topic to Virgin Media please.

[one2escape]

I voted for 50 / 50 if you hit a Uk based call centre you are sorted you hit an Indian one your not.

[AtW]

Can't get through to technical support on 0845 454 1111 - after choosing all options it says they have problems in the end and hang up, that's going on for 24 hours while my expensive 50 Mbits connection is down!!!

[telepest]

Have you tried 150? after all its free!

[AtW]

I don't have Virgin Media phone, only broadband - it's shocking really technical support line is experiencing technical problems, only you get told this right at the end of selection LOL

[Turkey Machine]

Originally Posted by AtW

I don't have Virgin Media phone, only broadband - it's shocking really technical support line is experiencing technical problems, only you get told this right at the end of selection LOL

You think that's bad, try talking to somebody at Orange about mobile problems. Selection after selection after selection then told "thank you for calling Orange. Goodbye!"

I dealt with a fantastic CS rep this Monday gone (17th) and he sorted out my bill then. I thanked him for it and asked to speak with his supervisor since he'd done a great job of sorting me and my bill out without hassle unlike some companies I know *SKY*

[Sannas]

Prior to today I would have said that speaking to VM technical support was next to useless I found in the past that speaking with these guys was a waste of time as soon as you went slightly technical above please reboot the modem and download a file they really didnt appear to have any knowledge of how these systems work. Yes yes I understand that the first person you speak to is going to be a level 1 cs support person but surely basic knowledge of fibre/switching/network should be applicable at this level.

However that said this was prior to today I actually had an experience of talking to a level 1 support engineer to find OMG shock horror she understood everything I was talking about and actually investigated the situation in a correct manor, explained to me what was going on and also explained that it had been raised to the next level and a national fault had been raised. I came off the phone feeling satisfied that I had been listened too and also strangley happy with our conversation even though my issue hadnt been resolved and will be once they fix it. So a big thumbs up to whoever that woman was at VM she new her job and the first person I spoke to at VM that knew what contention ratio, dark fibre, system bottlenecking and several other things to boot were

[mikegreen]

Originally Posted by MrRanner

If you are reading this from the position of someone who is looking at getting a Virgin Media service, I would recommend doing the following instead: get two plastic cups and thread a piece of string through them, stretch the string out until it is taught and you can hear noises being transmitted down the line; now, take some scissors and cut the string, take £30 out of your wallet and set fire to it; now do a wee in your cup, and hey presto! Virgin Media quality service without the hassle of a massive phone bill!

[kbd]

I've never had a reason to complain when I've gotten through to one of the UK based guys - who are technically decent and have a good manner also (considering dealing with the public can be a serious pain in the back side).

I've found about 1-in-4 of the guys in India are ok. The biggest problem they always have is their inflexibility in troubleshooting an issue - always wanting to go through a specific set of questions. However, that is a cultural and training issue that we could discuss for hours !!

Often we might burn 10 minutes going through the basics just to find out there is a known fault in my area. Even when I've explained to them there is a known fault and I'm asking for an update, they still insist on going through the basics before they even check for known faults.

They can send a man to the moon, but VM can't set up a system that alerts it's technicians to a known fault before they burn 10 minutes asking the customer pointless questions.

Maybe the answer is that 10-minutes of Indian Engineers time is cheaper than investing in decent information technology, but they've obviously not factored in how ****ed off the customer gets...... (or maybe they have considering we're all whining and still with VM !!)

---------- Post added at 01:21 ---------- Previous post was at 01:15 ----------

Originally Posted by Sannas

Prior to today I would have said that speaking to
explained that it had been raised to the next level and a national fault had been raised.

Sannas, I came to these boards hoping for some information about this fault that you describe - is there a thread here about it ?

Just thought I would add a heads up - when I enquired about a refund the Engineer said to me that I would be authorised to get one as the outage was over 24 hours.

I asked him if he was telling this to all customers - and he said yes.

I then asked him - if that was the case - why he hadn't told me about the refund until I asked him.... he couldn't explain that one !!!

.. but try asking for a refund on your bill if you can, often the biggest way these kind of issues get sorted (in the long term) is when money gets involved, and the management debate whose budget is going to get cross-charged for the costs incurred.

[adzii_nufc]

Well Virgin Media In My Eyes are Close If not the worst For Customer Service, Never in my life have i spoke to a Scottish Indian, Never Have I Had Listening Problems. Absolutely Pathetic

I have SKY in my home and I can get through fine to them

Virgin Media...well truth be told you only get good service when your ordering PPV's or Upgrading your service, Other than that its just complete *******s

[Seraphina]

Here is My experience of Virgin Media customer service. My family are gamers. When we had problems with high pings we called them. Now bear this in mind please my husband is a microsoft systems engineer and has been for 25 years. After calling customer support and being on hold for 40 mins He was put through to Tech support and spoke to someone called Nicola, who and I quote her on this "Sir you are a retard and talk nonsense" But afyer checking the virgin community foroums we saw that hundreds even thousands of people were having the same problem as we were. Still they refused to accept there was a problem. And kept denying that the use traffic shaping., Which afetr a conversation with Neil Berkett, my husband found out that this is in place. We have now left virgin media and thankfully have had no more problems...Wuite frankly VM staff are rude, incompetent, and nasty, unles you want to give virgin yrt more money for crap services of course.

---------- Post added at 13:27 ---------- Previous post was at 13:24 ----------

Originally Posted by mikegreen

I love it,. totally sums up Virgin media Good on you my friend for saying it