Virgin Media BAD Customer Service

stevem1982

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced bad customer service when it comes to Virginmedia!!

First of all, on installation of my account they managed to put the phone line in another house somewhere in the country. They kept charging me for the calls that someone else was making. 10+ phone calls later, 2 snotty emails, the canellation of my direct debits, and 3 months later they finally sent out an engineer to fix the problem. They then only refunded 75% of the money they owed me for these phone calls and seeing as I had already spent around £25 on phone calls to them I decided not to persue the matter further as it would probably cost me more than they owe me to actually get it back!

Now, when I moved house, I cancelled my account and their customer service representative said that's fine send us the modem, tv reciever, etc back and we will send you the final bill. He neglected to mention that the contract still had 2 months to run and that it would cost £100 to end early. Had I known this I would have let the contract expire and then cancel as this would have been a lot cheaper!

I've found the Virginmedia staff extremley unhelpful and have with their favourite lines being "there's nothing we can do" or "we'll call you back" (and of course they don't)

I'm really not sure where I stand on this, whether them not telling me about the cancellation fee and just charging me means I have an argument or not?? Any ideas and feedback would be appreciated.

Steve

macman

If you cancel before the end of your minimum term contract, you have to pay an early termination fee which is usually the same as what you would have paid to complete the minimum term.
So if you cancelled a 1yr contract after 10m, you would pay 2m subs as the penalty.
Quite standard terms on most telecoms contracts.

stevem1982

I do appreciate that but surley that should have been made clear?

Basically I upgraded the package after a year and a half and so the contract restarted i.e. the start date and end date changed, another thing that wasn't made clear. I was under the impression that they would be able to add extra packages without restarting the contract period. So when I came to cancel I wasn't aware that the contract had not expired. As far as I was aware I had the contract for about 2 and a half years.

When cancelling their customer services didn't tell me that the contract was not finished, instead they just cancelled it and put the charges on the bill. I would have hoped that they would be more informative and told me that there would be extra charges instead of adding this all to the bill and letting me find out when the bill came through. I was hoping that there would be some kind of rule that meant they had to tell you about these things rather then just adding the charges and shouting SUPRISE!

I'm just not happy that in my time with VirginMedia I have had so many problems, all of which seem to be due to them, and I get charged for calling them to fix their problems. And on top of that they didn't refund all charges that was owed.

talulahbeige_2

Welcome to the club.
Virgin Media are a nightmare, even the customer service complaint people are useless!
We've recently had 2 engineers vist, one referred to the customer services as sh*t and the other said that basially they have 70 seconds to deal with a query so the best way is to fob someone off and let the next person who takes their call deal with it, which they don't they have the same attitude and round and round you go!

I would be interested to see how many of Virgin customers have had an issue succesfully resolved on first contact, or i'd liek to hear about happy customers. I'm not sure either exisit!

macman

Any change to your contract with VM restarts it, whether adding features, or a promotional price cut.
Yes, they should certainly have pointed out to you that you were still in contract and that a termination fee applies, their CS is notoriously bad, as many others have found.
Unfortunately this doesn't get you out of paying the early termination fee.
Hopefully you have moved to a bettter ISP.