Apparently British people don’t complain enough, it’s written down somewhere, probably on the internet.
I like to complain though, and Virgin Media have been the company who have bore the front of my complaints the most in the past 12/14 months.
November/December 2009
Back then, we had the difficult task of moving NE1fm 102.5 to new studios. This was a massive undertaking, and took 4 weeks to move. We were advised 7 days for Virgin Media to move the services. However 4-6 weeks was the actual amount of time Virgin Media required to transfer services and install. Their staff suprisingly did everything required to gain their bonuses, but nothing to actually make anything happen.
Fast forward a bit, 15+ telephone calls resulted in a threat of me going to their London office. It was ‘laughed’ off. That evening their Chief Exec got an email, I got a phonecall back within 5 minutes and within 3 days we were magically sorted and compensated generously.
December 2010
Our cable connection went down. That’s fine, things break. But the first realisation I was going to struggle to get any sort of anything out of them occured when the ‘technical support adviser’ told me Virgin Media Cable Modems will not turn off if you turn off electricity. They magically will not turn off, somehow.
So, annoyed I was told an engineer would call on Thursday. That didn’t happen. I called them, he’ll call on Friday. You guessed it, no call Friday. I reminded them their Service Level Agreement was closing in and they wern’t interested – so I decided to threaten them with the Newspaper. They didn’t seem too bothered. So I called the paper and a story appeared Saturday morning.
Pleased with the first level of action, I called Virgin Media on the Monday. An engineer will be out this afternoon. 4pm Monday, I call – no engineer. I gently remind the guy on the phone that a newspaper has already ran a story on it, that they’ve failed their agreement, and the paper will run another story if it isn’t fixed on Monday. The drone advises he will ‘inform management’.
Fast forward. 16:55 Monday, newspaper has been notified. The story runs on Tuesday. Just before 5pm another phone call. Oh, Virgin Media and their first callback that week. An engineer will attend 9am Tuesday morning.
They attended 9am Tuesday (2x engineers/ 2x vans) and fixed the problem. But they were too late. The story ran anyway. If it hadn’t of been fixed today their Chief Exec would have got this instead of my blog. But hey-ho.
Apart from this being a small insight into something not very exciting. The moral of the story is to complain, and complain. They laugh it off until the big guns get involved – then they give you the service you should get anyway.
The press office at Virgin Media were made aware of the articles today. My phone has been going mad with London Virgin Media folks doing ‘all they can for me’ despite it being fixed. Would have been interesting if it wasn’t fixed today, they might have been able to magic something up.