VirginMedia - your experiences

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Gavin Scott
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StuartPlymouth wrote:...and stop denuding the point of my post
Nevers!
Stuart*
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My somewhat profitable experience with VM seems to be drawing to a close.

Having promised me a 'full refund' when I moved to Sky for my broadband & landline, I spoke to VM 10 days ago to check the progress. Although VM seemed to have missed the fact that Sky were providing my broadband since 21st April, they advised that they would be able to calculate and pay my refund after 9th May when my landline calls would no longer be chargeable through their service (even though I wasn't paying).

This afternoon VM calculated it, and also advised that they had cancelled the direct debit for the latest bill, which just included my over-zealous landline call usage on account of their freebie status!

Sky have written advising that they won't be charging me for landline calls until 20th May; they also confirmed this by phone today. So I rang BT to ask who my calls were charged to - they just said 'a third party, not BT'.

I think I'll enjoy another week or so of free landline calls (probably courtesy of VM). Despite all the hassle of changing suppliers, I seem to have come out as the winner from a financial point of view. One for the consumer, perhaps?
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Gavin Scott
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My phone line is on the fritz again. Its crackling something chronic.

Not sure whether I should ring and complain when they're giving me a grace period before I pay the bill (redundancy and all that).

Think I should?
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Sput
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Gavin Scott wrote:My phone line is on the fritz again. Its crackling something chronic.

Not sure whether I should ring and complain when they're giving me a grace period before I pay the bill (redundancy and all that).

Think I should?
I doubt their maintenance and billing systems would talk to each other unless they decided to charge you for the repair, so I say go for it.
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Steve in Pudsey
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To sum up my VM experience - service is great, tech support/customer service is totally incompetent.

Bearing in mind that I'm perhaps not your average punter given that I work in IT and am perfectly capable of troubleshooting a network problem, and would generally only call them when I'm convinced that the fault is at their end, I get particularly annoyed at being patronised and lied to by their "technicians".

Now I fully understand why they have tiers of support people and level 1 is there to filter out the numpties who haven't plugged something in, but it would be quite nice if they could recognise people who are talking knowledgeably about the troubleshooting they've done, realise that their scripts are a waste of time for both parties and pass the call on to somebody cluefull.

For example, I called to report that their DNS server (or my connection thereto) was playing up, and that if I entered the IP address of a site I wanted to visit I got there, but the DNS name wasn't getting resolved, and that I'd been able to ping the DNS server. I found being asked to "click start, go to run, type in c-m-d and then press return, then type in p-i-n-g..." was a bit patronising when I's already made it obvious I knew how to ping. To be told that "if entering the IP address gets you to the site it can't be a DNS error" and told with some glee, after pinging the DNS server succeeded "there you go sir, that's just proved that the DNS server works" was intensely annoying - it's proved nothing of the sort, it's proved that a box with that IP address responds to pings, doesn't mean there's a working DNS resolver on it. I doubt that she actually knew what DNS actually does.

I wish these companies would realise that people like myself are in a position where you get asked for recommendations for ISPs, so leaving a more favourable impression might be a nice business plan for them.
Nini
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Yep, I'll agree with that sentiment, their tech support is complete garbage. Actually went through the exact same thing and yeah, whilst most people have never had to open up a command prompt to go ping a DNS server some of us have so please don't spell out ipconfig to me, it's in readable English for fucks sake! I tried to get to higher than Tier 1 but couldn't as they didn't have the decency to call me back when they ended after 20 mins, spent 40 minutes trying to resolve a problem that was their fault though they got very defensive when their basic troubleshooting scripts couldn't fix what problem I had and now have two heavy premium rate call charges in the area of £6 each due to those aimless dolts. They get £12, I got a fucking earache and very irate, wouldn't even waive the damn charges after going through to complaints, the shits.

Just don't try and get tech support for a Mac or a Linux box, almost like you've decided to speak too fast and patronisingly with a heavy accent too.
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Sput
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If it was their fault they should be reimbursing you using a credit to your bill. The number is now free again, I believe
Knight knight
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nidave
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Steve in Pudsey wrote:To sum up my VM experience - service is great, tech support/customer service is totally incompetent.

Bearing in mind that I'm perhaps not your average punter given that I work in IT and am perfectly capable of troubleshooting a network problem, and would generally only call them when I'm convinced that the fault is at their end, I get particularly annoyed at being patronised and lied to by their "technicians".

No offence - I work in front line, 2nd line and 3rd line Tech support for the various pieces of software we support and you would be surprised the amount of times I have had the IT people on the phone wanting help for BASIC problems - for example -

a message saying the disk is full:
IT: Its a server so it cant be full

Disk or network error:
Me: the network connection looks like its dropped - reboot the pc and see if that works
IT: It cant be or else programme A would not work

Unable to create File - you do not have the nesesary permissions:
ME: You need to give the used permissions to the data directory
IT: Its not a permissions thing as they are a local administrator
ME: that does not matter as its the network disk they need permissions for

There are a lot of people in the IT industry who think they know it all and wont take the experience of the Tech people into account - Yes the issue might not be as simple but 99.999999999% of the time it is a problem we have had before and know the most common causes and need to rule them out.
Nini
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You're not scripted, are you? Can you deviate from it and use your own knowledge of the software to give better support?

If the answer to any of these is yes then I salute you.
Nini
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Sput wrote:If it was their fault they should be reimbursing you using a credit to your bill. The number is now free again, I believe
Well, I did have proof as to it being their fault but they held steadfast and denied it all the way down the line because it must have been my equipment. Yup, all 5 of my working hardware setups (including the mentioned Linux and Mac setups) must be wrong.

Wasn't free when I did it 4 weeks or so ago and I might just have to write a letter.. pretty sure it doesn't go free until June though.
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Sput
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Ah right, thankfully I've not had to call lately although I can now announce that I finally am online with virgin. Turns out that this ancient box does indeed work (after being reconnected to the cabinet) and all is now well, despite virgin's best attempts to ignore its existence.
Knight knight
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