Guys, I’ve been a customer since February and I’ll dive right in with my list of recommendations. There is, if you have a look around the t’internet, a positive SEA of negative comments surrounding this company.
I’ll be honest, I’ve had problems. I’ve had a number of problems. The installation was messy and they turned my neighbours drive into a rubbish tip but the broadband connection seemed fast enough.
However, here’s what I’ve noticed..
- Without fail, almost every single day the service status shows some sort of problem, especially on the TV. Here’s an example. Virgin tell me that they’re making a number of “improvements” which would explain the messages, but when you CONSTANTLY see problem updates on their Service Status (whether you’ve noticed anything or not), it makes you feel like it’s falling apart. Not good. Not good at all.
- The customer service agents are all from overseas. Even the “Virgin Media Business” customer service people are from abroad – in the Philippines. Very rarely do any of them speak to each other, and getting your message across is incredibly difficult, especially when you’re met with screen-prompt-reading zombies who just tell you to turn everything off and on again. You can tell them, as I did, that the service is locked to 50Mbps when you’ve actually got a 200Mbps package. You can tell them that it’s been this way since engineers worked in the cabinet, but no… “Turn it off and on again”. Gah…
- Virgin Media Residential and Virgin Media Business do not talk to each other. You end up being the go-between. It’s annoying as hell.
- The flashy new TiVo box is just awkward to use. The on-demand content is mixed up with the catch-up content, the regularly-used “back up” button is tiny and off to the left side of the remote, the colours on the menu system are dull and switching channels needs you to press “OK” to activate the search / scan banner before you press up and down. Why? Why not just press up and down? Would that be too hard?
- When things go wrong, the fix time is too long. Right now, our entire village appears to be offline. This means that there’s no TV and no internet. Fix time? Tomorrow afternoon, maybe. Maybe not. Who knows. That’s if you’re lucky.
- Look at the amount of outages and the amount of problems on the “Service status” screen. If there’s more than 10 in any 6 months, DON’T EVEN THINK about ramping up the prices for those customers. I’ve just been asked for another £3.50 per month, which is a relatively huge leap considering the amount of TV problems and service outages everybody on our estate has put up with.
So come on Virgin, you really need to sharpen up. The network is a mash of old cable companies. The street cabinets look unloved and messy. The engineers don’t seem too concerned, the customer service staff follow basic screen prompts and you don’t seem to care too much about the mountains of negative feedback from customers. Stop sending junk mail through my door (which I still get even as a customer) and spend that money on your network. Update it. Stabilise it. Come up with a fully localised TV V6 box, not some knock-off American version where you’ve badly tweaked it to just-about work for your UK customers. It’s not good enough.