Virgin Media: Haggle down your costs.

overnetworld

a bit of advise please, I have the following:

10 meg broadband
xl phone (free unlimited landline calls)
discount on mobile and international calls (had this chucked in for free)
TV M - free tv package for spare bedroom.

Pay £26 and some pence a month had this deal since sept 08 (offered this midway through my cancellation peiod) rang them up and got told this was a good deal and on the current deals offered it's 33 quid.

Can I get a better deal of virgin ??

cosmoray

Thanks for all the helpful posts.

Have been with virgin (and prior to that ntl) for over ten years. Had phone (£11) and broadband (size M but recently upgraded to 10Meg, £20) only but saw new customers were being offered 10 Meg broadband for £12.50.

Phoned virgin earlier today to explain that I had been a loyal customer but was concerned that there were much better deals now. Kept it very polite and had a very good response, instantly moving me over to the £12.50 rate. The operator did refer to a loyal customer discount so obviously an option available to them. Also dumped the paper bills which were adding another £1 odd. Overall saving of around £100 per year.

Agreed to a 12-month contract on this and could have got a cheaper deal elsewhere (BT, Talk Talk) but didn't fancy the prospect of getting new lines, reconfiguring routers, etc.

Doing homework of the other deals available but keeping it polite got me a deal I'm happy with.

hansi

JeffGeoff wrote: »

Hi everybody, first MSE post and thought I'd share our tale of woe and see if anyone has any advice / suggestions...

My fianc! and I just moved into a new house, our first time in a Virgin area, so decided to see what they could offer us. Having read this super useful topic, we called Virgin, called BT and recalled Virgin, and finally negotiated the following deal:

20mb BB (XL I believe)
Evening and weekend calls (XL again, I think)
M+ TV
V+ Box

For the price of £30 per month, including line rental and V+ box cost. On top of this, we would pay no installation for either Virgin or the V+ box, plus we'd get the first 2 months of subscription free.

So I was very happy this and went ahead and ordered Virgin, but not before I very explicitly went through 3 separate times exactly what it was we were agreeing to (the package, the price, the upfront costs).

All seemed well, we had the Virgin man come and install, everything was operating hunky-dory, until we get our contract to sign, and disaster! It bore no resemblance to what we had agreed to!

So on the phone to Virgin I get, I get passed around 3 different people, before getting put through to a 'Sales Manager' who said they weren't able to give me that offer and the notes on my account didn't match what I was saying. I argued that this wasn't good enough and after almost an hour on the phone I was promised that they would load up the original recording, and that if the tapes verified what I had said (which I knew they would) I would be given that exact deal. This would take some time, and the person we originally spoke to wasn't in that day, so they would call us back on the Saturday.

Come Saturday... no call... all day...

So we waited until Monday, to give them a chance, then we called again. After being passed around a few times again we finally got through to someone called Andrew who seemed at least willing to listen to us. He clarified that not every call is recorded and there was no way they could go back and listen to that particular call. Further, not a single note had been added to our account from our second call (which took almost 1 hr)!!!!

What an absolute disaster.

So now we're left with the best offer of:
L BB
XL Phone
M+ TV
V+ box
for £37.45 per month

and a very bad taste in the mouth regarding all things Virgin.

We're currently thinking that we'll call up, cancel the whole service, and go with BT or Talk-Talk instead. It's a shame as we've been very happy with the actual media service Virgin has provided, they've just been horribly let down by horrendous customer service.

So this post has two intentions:
i) Be warned about Virgin's sales / customer services teams!!
ii) Before we go ahead and cancel, any suggestions from any MSEs? We'd be perfectly happy if we could get the deal we originally agreed to!

You could try registering on http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/ there are a lot of virgin employees on there, maybe if you explain, someone could help you.

r2b89_

Hi,

All you have to do is call them again and say i am going to cancel as virgin is in breech of the verbal agreement you had over the phone with them and insist that you should be entitled to the original offer as there is no fault on your part that both calls were not recorded and also that no notes were left on the system. And also make sure you state that you only took up the original offer as it was better than any other offer available from other providers and also that the previous offer was in your budget.

Let me know how it goes.:T

ste1010

I am currently paying £29 pcm for line rental, talk evening/weekend and Medium Broadband (although I think this is now upgraded to 10M).

I currently have the basic Sky+ package for £21 pcm. I am looking to reduce monthly costs and am looking at repalcing sky+ with V+ Large. Everytime I ring VM i seem to get an offshore call centre and the people I speak to just seem to keep offering me standard deals. I know I could get a better deal as a new customer but the call centre agents dont want to know.

Can anyone who has negotiated a better deal tell me who they have spoken to and what number they have dialed.

Thanks in advance

RICK..._2

I have 'L' Broadband with Virgin, which is 10mb. Was paying £20 a month for that alone.

BT home phone contract was coming to an end on 1st Jan, so called VirginMedia and went straight through to cancellations, told them I was thinking of cancelling my broadband as I'd worked out it'd be cheaper to have a BT phone line and 8mb ADSL with O2.

They offered me my current broadband AND a phone line for the same price as I'm paying now. Pretty chuffed with that to be honest! I'll give it a few months then try and upgrade my broadband for free, or get my bill down even more.

JeffGeoff

thanks for the advice folks, resolution has been thus: after several phonecalls, we ended up following the suggestion to simply cancel. We ended up with £34 per month for L broadband, L phone and M+ TV, plus one V+ box. No longer an outstanding offer, but an acceptable one considering the alternatives (we can't get ITV or channel 4 through our tv aerial!)

best of luck to anyone else negotiating, and thanks again for the help.

robins66

I noticed my bill had jumped by a large amount around June last year. On checking the discounts agreed when setting up with VM had been removed and a further charge for the previous month (claimed back). Checked my agreement which actually quoted all the charges and discounts and specified that the contract will be for a MINIMUM of 12 months. However there was no maximum term. As this is a Consumer Credit Act agreement, I tried arguing the point that they cannot change that agreement without notifying me first. Due to commitments at the time, I was unable to spend time pursuing this with Trading Standards or FSA and ended up paying more each month. Did get a refund of two months discounts they had removed/charged.
Any views?
Can they be challenged as technically they are in breach of contract?

ste1010

jeffgeoff - did this include the £11 line rental or is £34 +11

cheers

LilyLarkin

Hi everyone - I'm new to the forum/thread.

Just on a cost-cutting exercise at the moment and was looking where to save on phone, broadband etc and I'm hoping someone can help. At the moment, I am with Virgin and paying:

Line rental: 11.00
Talk Unlimited: 7.95
TV size L: 11.50
Broadband M: 20.00
Plus I have a loyalty discount of -£13.50

Total costs (not including additional phone charges for 0870 numbers etc): £36.95

I'm looking to get rid of the TV and just buy a freeview box - I'm not a big TV watcher - so the cost would then be £27.50 (as the loyalty discount would not be as a high - £11.50 instead).

I also saw the TalkTalk Pro deal, and decided to switch over, but now I'm a bit confused as to what to do for the best as I'm not sure it is really for me, and while they offered half price installation (instead of £59.99) I don't really want my broadband speed to be affected.

I phoned Virgin and they don't seem to be able to offer me that much of a better deal - and the package they did say they could give me at £26.94 (to match TalkTalk, though it didn't totally, as it doesn't of course include the free calls to 0870 numbers) would have meant I'd have to get rid of the TV anyway.

Also, it seemed they use the 'loyalty discount' to tell you that you are actually paying a cheaper price for broadband (have other people found this? Is this normal?).

A bit confused as to how to proceed - have only just agreed to go ahead with Talk so can cancel, but haven't yet actually negotiated anything different with Virgin or instructed them to disconnect, either.

Can anyone offer some advice? Thanks!