MSE News: Virgin Media to hike prices

vivtse

Uther and Nick,

Finally got a result!! After my 3 hours on the phone the other day spent arguing my rights, I posted complaint via their web page and messaged them on twitter. They have a social media form on virg.co/social so I filled that in too last night. I was so surprised that the social media team called this morning and the lady was so apologetic that CS were so unhelpful. She basically said that we were right and the CS team were wrong and we could cancel within 30 days of bill increase regardless of notification. They would feed back to them. She offered to waive the 30 days notice and disconnect within 24 hours or any date after if we wanted without paying any kind of early disconnection fee as their T&C'S said.

So it would seem virgin media are more concerned about the impression they make on social media sites than investigating complaints via their online form or via customer services. I hope this helps anyone else wanting to disconnect!

ken_1969

Price hike was a perfect opportunity to check my deal with Virgin, so armed with the MSE haggling methodology I went to work.
I'm currently on 120MB broadband plus M+ TV and a V+ HD box; BT's "equivalent" was over £20 cheaper; of course the nice man at Virgin customer retentions tried to argue that it's not like for like - BT's TV packages are mostly freeview and even their 76MB broadband is more like 50MB. I responded that at least with BT "unlimited" broadband means unlimited and after traffic shaping I don't get much more than 50MB from Virgin during peak times.
Of course, I didn't tell Virgin that BT currently only offer their 38MB broadband service where I am and he was none the wiser. It would definitely be a bit uncomfortable downgrading that far so I was keen to stick with Virgin.
It was a very friendly chat and the end result was I got myself an upgrade to a Tivo box plus an overall bill reduction of £23.74 per month instead of a £4.50 price hike. 12 month contract only rather than BT's 18 month. All in all a very good day of MoneySaving. Virgin should raise their prices more often!