Nightmare Virgin Experience

mizzbiz

Hello, I just want to make any gullible bargain seekers aware of the months of hassle and overcharging you can get yourself into if you listen to anything anyone from Virgin says. We are so sick them now and are on the brink of cancelling completely.

So to start, we have been with them since 2009 and were, until the end of last year, on a rolling contract. We rang up to see if they could give us a better deal than we could get from Sky and they couldn't, so we gave our 30 days notice and awaited disconnection.

TWO DAYS before disconnection we get a call from retentions (sales) with some very good deals after all. We agreed to a great contract at £34.24 per month for V+, TV XL and our usual 10 meg broadband and basic phone line on a 12 month contract. We checked it would stay the same when we moved and this was affirmative.

All good, yes? NO!!

1) First contract comes through - 18 months. DH phones up to say it's only 12 months. 2 hours on the phone, back and forth. According to someone at Virgin, our TV was 16 months, our phone line 18 months and our internet 12 months :eek: After much negotiation nothing gave and the Virgin Customer Services tried to imply we were liars. Asked for proof of the original phone call, and I think as someone else on here said, they only keep some and not others. SO DH said he wanted to cancel. Suddenly, we can have the twelve month contract but at £37.24 pm instead. Not good enough, says DH, Cancel. Ok, then you can have it at £34.24 by me applying a credit.

2) So, we move a couple of weeks later and installation is done by Virgin. No V+ on our ticket, poor installer was on phone to HO for ages and had to give us someone else's V+ box as we were in a different 'zone'. He had to convince them to get them to activate V+, even though we already had it on the contract and eventually they did.

3) Our 'NEW' contract comes through the door a convenient 9 days later. What are we being charged? £34.24? As if! £37.24? Yeah right. Our bill has gone up to £43.67, plus £40 for installation and £49 for V+. Back on the phone for a few more hours. SOmeone 'helps' and we think all is solved.

4) Couple of days later we get our new bill for £47.24, still including the installation and V+ charge. We feel like crying. What can we do? This is just hopeless. DH back on phone to sort out. Hours of misery, arguments and apparent sympathy, a new credit is applied to bring the bill back down to what we agreed and supposedly, the other two charges taken off.

5) So I gets an email saying our new bill is ready. It's only £170 :mad: and it's to be taken directly out of our account. We analyse this bill but cannot for the life of us see why we would be paying this much - ambiguous to say the least. Back on the phone, wits end? Yep, we're there. Hours on the phone again, some guy says yeah, our mistake again, very sorry. I'll sort it all out. Did tell us to cancel the DD as the payment had already been requested and hubby paid the new amount due. Hubby asks about the original credit to bring the bill back down to agreed price. Oh, that's on your other account. Husband asks for it to be transferred to whichever account we are using. ALl is agreed. All is supposedly well. Off we go to try and enjoy our lives a bit before the inevitable.

6) Sitting here tonight and our tv pops up with a message saying our services are being removed and our box will reset soon. OMG we can't take anymore! On a Friday night too :-( Back on the phone. We haven't paid the bill so the collections department have restricted our account. How dare they do this without so much as a phone call after all they have put us through? Husband says well, I only owed you £20 odd quid. No, it was 60 odd says collections. What about that credit ont he other accoutn that was transferred? Oh, two cheques went out to our old address. Can you believe these people? Why? Why? WHy? :eek: So apparently it's sorted now. My husband only has to spend monday evening on the phone to them again reinstating his direct debit and requesting the two pointless cheques be cancelled.

It'll probably be a week before nightmare number seven. This has been going on three months since we re-entered a contract situation with Virgin. Never again. I can't wait til the twelve month contract is over. We will never use them again, ever. Poor customer service, poor communication and what I like least of all, this is a huge, profitable company that is in effect STEALING from its customers whilst hobbling them with contracts that they enforce, but do not perform their side of.

God, how we wished we had continued with the notice and gone with Sky.

Any other shocking experiences with Virgin gladly received. I am considering writing to head office but if their executives are as incompetent and ignorant as their customer service staff, I wonder what the point is.

Prav

After a similar experience with you regarding paragraph 1), I now record my contract renewal conversations with Virgin otherwise they accuse you of lying!

dazzaofdagenham

i can honestly say they are all the same SKY VIRGIN MOBILE PHONE companies.

I have just left SKY for Virgin as i was having similiar trouble.

I always now record phone calls to them ( but let them know its being recorded ) and i always follow up any change of contract etc with a recorded delivery letter.

Touch wood so far i have been OK..

Darren

shellsuit

We got a call last week from retentions. Hubby haggled with them and what usually costs us £110 a month, they said they would bring it down to £80 a month and also throw in a new box for one of the bedrooms. (We have 3 other boxes, one in our bedroom and one each in the kids rooms)

We're pleased with that so accept.

Box came on Friday and this morning a new contract comes through the post (?!) and says 18 months on it?

We didn't accept an 18 month contract, we accepted 12 months!

Also it says monthly payments will be £89.29.

That's not £80!

Will have to wait for hubby to come home and sort it as the account is in his name, but if they think we will be staying with them for another 18 months, they can think again and we will cancel and go back to Sky.

Heinz

Bet they'll say he verbally accepted the 18 month contract during the phone call.

jem16

Heinz wrote: »

Bet they'll say he verbally accepted the 18 month contract during the phone call.

You still have 7 days from receipt of written contract to cancel though.

shelley_crow

i had the same experience with virgin and i had been with telewest/virgin for 5 years.

I've since moved to sky and had almost exactly the same problem, contract is up in september and i'll be going to freeview!

mizzbiz

Glad we're not the only ones. We actually specified 12 months on the original sales call and said we wouldn't agree to 18 months. They agreed that was fine.

It's seems Virgin are getting away with overcharging and misselling on a huge scale and making the resolution so complicated and frustrating as to get away with it. Yes, the customer leaves afetr 18/12 months but they manage to get more money than agreed out of them over that time.

My hubby is great. He keeps fighting on and eventually, after months we'll get somewhere. But it shouldn't be like this, we are customers. Don't we deserve decent customer service? I run a business and have worked in various businesses and Virgin do everything completely backwards to me. I would never lie or overcharge my customers. I also ensure that any problems they have are addressed equitably(not that any of my customers have these problems).

It does seem to me that one of the problems with Virgin and Sky is that they are a virtual monopoly in their respective sectors. Which is probably why they are not that scared of Ofcom, depsite being pulled up for misselling in the past. If we continue to have issues, we will be reporting them to trading standards and Ofcom as it's causing significant stress for something that should be easy.

Anyway, rant over and thanks for everyone's input and stories. Good to see that we're not alone in this :-)

shellsuit

shellsuit wrote: »

We got a call last week from retentions. Hubby haggled with them and what usually costs us £110 a month, they said they would bring it down to £80 a month and also throw in a new box for one of the bedrooms. (We have 3 other boxes, one in our bedroom and one each in the kids rooms)

We're pleased with that so accept.

Box came on Friday and this morning a new contract comes through the post (?!) and says 18 months on it? apparantly the bloke who he'd dealt with had entered it wrong so he had to sort it out and get a new 12 month contract through the post?

We didn't accept an 18 month contract, we accepted 12 months!

Also it says monthly payments will be £89.29.

That's not £80!

Will have to wait for hubby to come home and sort it as the account is in his name, but if they think we will be staying with them for another 18 months, they can think again and we will cancel and go back to Sky.

He called the other night and was meant to be getting a call back yesterday regarding it.

Nobody called back and unfortunately we had some bad news yesterday so totally forgot to call them.

I'll get him to ring this evening as there's noooooo way on earth we'll be staying with them for 18 months.

sirmarcus

I always send an email to Virginmedia or any other company, whenever I speak to their customers services people with regards contract changes, price changes, service changes, etc. Whenever there is any subsequent dispute with regards these changes, I use the emails as evidence and I often get a quick resolution in my favour.

For Virginmedia, I send emails to [EMAIL="neil.berkett@virginmedia.co.uk"]neil.berkett@virginmedia.co.uk[/EMAIL], whom is the VM Chief Executive, and to [EMAIL="richard.branson@fly.virgin.com"]richard.branson@fly.virgin.com[/EMAIL]. I also have a couple of email addresses for VM customers services, which I use to send emails to as well.

For SKY, try [EMAIL="jeremy.darroch@bskyb.com"]jeremy.darroch@bskyb.com[/EMAIL], who is the BSKYB Chief Executive.

mizzbiz

Just an update as got in our new bill for this month

£102

Should be £35

Are we going to have to ring up every week for the next twelve months? They are determined to overcharge - what more can we do. Who's to say we have £170 or £102 available on our account for these extortionate bills?

Thanks for those email addresses. May well email a link to this thread. This is mental abuse, not customer service.