Jaw vs. Virgin Media

I don't understand such behaviour, they're operating in a cut-throat industry and still they seem to get away with it. I've googled Virgin Media complaints for a bit and now have the CEO's email address think I'll give that one a go next.

OK, went with what people said on another forum and send an email to Mr Berkett from Virgin Media, lets see if they reply. If I don't get a reply before 6 today I will call the billing department as BE seems a very reasonable alternative, even if it means getting into bed with BT again.

I have now received a personal email from Neil Berkett that one of his team will contact me shortly. Let's see what happens next.

Any ideas to what I should demand?

Just emailed Mr Berkett:

Hi Neil,

I was advised by a friend to send you a brief overview of how things have been in the first week of being a Virgin customer.

Our telephone line, cable-TV and cable broadband were installed last Friday (the 3rd of December).

When the engineer left the only operational service was the TV. After spending an hour (one solid hour) on the phone to your tech support we got the Internet connection working, but sadly this broke the TV.

After another hour on the phone (2 hours so far, first night of Virgin, all to an 0845) the tech support said "there is nothing further to be done, please wait 24 hours".

She was almost right- it took 48 hours, but the TV then started working, and to be fair now works very well. However, it seems that we are only allowed one of the three services that we are paying for to work- the telephone connection has never worked, and the Virgin automated systems do not recognise the number that the engineer said was ours.

Also, and this did raise an ironic smile, I just clicked on the "Virgin Broadband" speedtester- part of Virgins campaign to shame other ISP's into providing the advertised speed.

I got 0.68 Megabit/sec download, and 0.53 upload- not quite the 10 Meg I am being billed for.

So, as I sit here and type this I have working TV- great. No phone- not so great. And Internet that is barely faster than 56K dial-up.

It would be fair to say that I am disappointed.

I just phoned the customer contact number, which kept me on the line (0845, which Virgin is making money from every minute) for 7 minutes going through automated menu's before telling me that the contact centre had been shut due to the weather.

I would have appreciated not having to pay you £2.50 to find out that you were not going to help me.

My question is are you going to do anything about this?

Neil
shoulda read the whole thread really before jumping in with my 'original' advice... oh well, at least it's a proven method!