Virgin Media 'Deadlock' not accepting online contract after 9 months of discussion....

Deanna74

Question first then the full story below for detail- Has anyone with a not honoured Virgin Media online contract gone to 'deadlock' and had a decision go in their favour? Or is this just another stalling tactic and we will need to go to the ombudsman?

We've been with Virgin Media for broadband, TV and phone for 10+ years and are happy with the actual service and don't have any other real options for fast broadband, so leaving isn't much of an option (though we haven threatened this!)

We went out of contract in September last year, and went on to the rolling contract (life happened we forgot to renew) - so 18th November logged on to online account, offered new contract for £90.57 for 18 months (various sport, netflix etc included as well as) it seemed like a good deal, so clicked to accept this offer rather than the £120 we were on out of contract. Got an email that same day with the CIS and CSS documents attached - what we assumed are contracts - they tell us about our 14 day cooling off period and say 'Contract' on them. Nothing in the body of the email or on the contracts, suggests that we need to do anything further.

Checked the online account later in the month, 29th November, the offer is there again for a new contract at £90.57, but the one we have done doesn't show, so we do it again, are emailed CIS and CSS, with the same email, no further action is suggested, or seemingly required. 

We spotted in January that the December payment was still £120 - so we did an online chat about this - and were told it would be sorted - payments still coming out at the higher value another month later. Various calls made every month since, Customer Services will sort it.... clearly 9 months later still not happened. We did finally get told the CIS and CSS were evidence and should be honoured on 23rd June and given an email address to send these to. No call back, nothing in response, so called again in July and told to wait for response.

Finally this week, we cracked and would not end the call until getting somewhere, after an hours phone call on Tuesday, a team member referred our CIS/CSS for review and a back dated refund (over £300 at this point), and she called back today (Thursday) to say it has been denied because the order was 'not completed' either because it was a new customer only offer, or it was an 'abandoned order' - neither of which is the case. She was only offering a deal dated back to June at todays prices - stood our ground and said, 'No, honour the 18 month contract from November.' Got handed to another person in another complaints department, who only tried to offer a 24 month contract at todays prices.

I told her repeatedly this is irrelevant as we just want the 18 month contract honoured, so she ended up offering us the 'deadlock' mediation. Does anyone know if this is likely to go in our favour and has gone through this?

Ectophile

"Deadlock" is simply them acknowledging that they cannot resolve your complaint to your satisfaction.

It's not an admission of anything, but it does mean that you are free to move on to whatever mediation scheme they have signed up to.