Saturday 27 December 2014

Update on Virgin Media Complaint


Here's my complaint to Virgin, which has now reached the CISAS stage. I will report to you whether I am given not given fair compensation or if I am given fair compensation.

The amount I am claiming is for all the loss of service and loss of money Virgin media have caused myself and my family until now. As I have mentioned, this has happened on at least 40 times this year alone. There have always been problems with them in other years, and it has always been difficult to get them to resolve them. We have been with Virgin Media for years and pay a relatively high price of £26 a month just for the internet service. I would estimate that in the past five years each year there have been at least 25 instances per year when we have not had internet access.
In total I have spent around 12 hours complaining and researching the problems. That combined with the loss of income resulting from the loss of internet provision actually amounts to much more than £200 lost by myself.

In the previous years. I didn't want to waste my time complaining but something must be done about this, as I know many other people who have been damaged by Virgin Media as well and want to improve their situation. I find it worrying that despite telling me that the service would improve on the 27th October the service was not available for hours yesterday. I am happy to provide you with all the emails I sent if needed, and you may listen to all my phone recordings with Virgin Media and OFCOM.

I am complaining about the service that Virgin Media provides. There have been many times that I have had no internet access at all this year‐ around 40 times in total. The problems were at
there most severe on the 14th of October which is when I first complained. During this day and
in the 15th of October I had practically no internet service at all. This was very frustrating and
cost me money as I am a share investor, poker player and writer amongst other things and rely
on the internet for my living. I spent hours on the phone to an Indian call centre who said that my
claim would be dealt with, but it turned out they did nothing at all. I stressed to the call centre that the most important thing was that this loss of service didn't happen again and they agreed with me they would do their best to make sure it never happened again. I also spent many hours writing emails to the Virgin media team. They were very slow in responding. I gave them all the information I could but they insisted they needed the account number and password which were difficult to find. I eventually managed to locate these and
sent them to virgin on the 24th October. It wasn't until the 27th October that Virgin media finally
said they would do something to improve the service, here is a quote from an email:
"I've checked your account for faults and through October we've had a number of SNR issues
(Signal to noise Ratio) which we've addressed. These would have caused slower than
expected speeds and intermittent disconnections. I am very sorry about that frustration these issues have caused and have credited your account with £13 to cover 50% of your monthly
broadband costs." Please note that these 'intermittent disconnections' were not intermittent at all up until the 27th October‐ there were many hours when I could not access the internet. Please also note that Virgin refused to give me any money which I specifically asked for. Even this insulting amount of £13 could only be seen on the 20th November.

A few weeks later despite the internet working I was blocked from viewing a webpage that I had accessed before. There was a 'warning sign' from Virgin media that this site was not suitable for small children. I quickly clicked that I wanted to access thissite but could not
continue to the site. The webpage from Virgin specifically stated that I would only see this screen once. In fact I was able to access no new sites for at least one hour, with this webpage appearing again and again despite clicking that I wanted to proceed to different sites.

There have still been problems since then but on Wednesday 26th November I was unable to access the internet for two hours. There were other faults during that day which even though only for 10 minutes or so caused me financial loss. I was so frustrated by this time that I called OFCOM again (for the third time) and I was told I could bring the complaint to you if Virgin media issued a final response which they now have done.

1 comment:

  1. Virgin have been terrible for me as well. I know what you're going through as I went to CISAS and eventually got fair compensation.

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