VIRGIN MEDIA

TJExcalibur

TJExcalibur

Regular Member
My Satellite Setup
Master Focus 90cm .Gigablue UHD Quad 4K on TM 2600 motor. *Tm 5402 HD M3, *Atemio Nemesis. *Not Used.
My Location
Southern England
I have been with Virgin since it was the old cable and wireless when they first put it in around here. Got 2 phone lines, broadband and TV package. Every few months they put the price up of one or the other. Any clues who is a good provider and reasonable with the prices. I looked on Money Supermarket but the combinations of have this but not that, but pay now and less later was to confusing.
 
I got a letter the other day saying they are putting up the prices again

Give them a ring on 150, choose the option to say you are moving or you want to leave and then choose the option to say you don't want to take your services with you (this will get you through to retentions)

Tell them you are not happy and sky have offered you half price TV for 6 month plus free fibre broadband for 6 month if you pay full phone line rental or something silly like that and VM will bend over backwards with discounts to keep your custom
 
It doesn't always work like that. What they offered me was next to nothing so i left them and went to BT. The start with BT was a little shaky due to not having a phoneline, but that was all sorted out fairly quickly.

I left VM over the fact they wanted to charge me £49 for one of their monkies to screw an f connector into a new box and make a phone call to switch it on, plus the fact all their prices were going up again. If i would have been a new customer i would have had the installation for free and would have got a half price deal for 6 months. To be honest considering the amount of money i was spending with them every month it was a bit of an insult to be charged £49 considering what was involved.

I have had the full package with BT and it is saving me nearly £40 a month compared to what i was paying Vermin Media. With the fibre role out from BT Openreach its worth shopping around. Virgin isn't the only company offering high speed internet. Its also worth remembering that Virgin also throttle your broadband speed during busy periods. My BT connection doesn't slow down in the evening where the Virgin one slows down where its significantly noticeable.

Nano
 
smoggy07 said:
I got a letter the other day saying they are putting up the prices again

Give them a ring on 150, choose the option to say you are moving or you want to leave and then choose the option to say you don't want to take your services with you (this will get you through to retentions)

Tell them you are not happy and sky have offered you half price TV for 6 month plus free fibre broadband for 6 month if you pay full phone line rental or something silly like that and VM will bend over backwards with discounts to keep your custom
Click to expand...

Thanks. I will give it a go.
 
nano said:
It doesn't always work like that. What they offered me was next to nothing so i left them and went to BT. The start with BT was a little shaky due to not having a phoneline, but that was all sorted out fairly quickly.

I left VM over the fact they wanted to charge me £49 for one of their monkies to screw an f connector into a new box and make a phone call to switch it on, plus the fact all their prices were going up again. If i would have been a new customer i would have had the installation for free and would have got a half price deal for 6 months. To be honest considering the amount of money i was spending with them every month it was a bit of an insult to be charged £49 considering what was involved.

I have had the full package with BT and it is saving me nearly £40 a month compared to what i was paying Vermin Media. With the fibre role out from BT Openreach its worth shopping around. Virgin isn't the only company offering high speed internet. Its also worth remembering that Virgin also throttle your broadband speed during busy periods. My BT connection doesn't slow down in the evening where the Virgin one slows down where its significantly noticeable.

Nano
Click to expand...
You can argue over the install fee and get it waived by paying the 1st month up front or paying a £25 deposit

Sent from my GT-S6810P using Tapatalk
 
In all honesty I did argue over the price and got no where, plus you pay one month in front with Virgin anyway so that would have been irrelevant. The way i look at it is why should i pay them a £25 deposit when i was already paying them nearly £80 a month to start with and if they had installed the new Tivo i would have been locked into a 12 month contract so they would have been quids in anyway?

I had been a customer for well over 5 years without missing one payment which doesn't seem to matter to Virgin Media.

To be honest it was p**s poor service if you ask me, there was no room for any negotiation, it was either pay the £49 or don't have a second Tivo box. Even Sky have more leeway when it comes to negotiations about price. Every year for the last three years i have managed to get Sky to considerably drop their prices to one i'm happy to pay. This doesn't happen with Virgin. Not dropping the £49 charge has cost them over a £1000 a year in lost business. They obviously think they are big enough to risk p**sing their customers off with their extortionate charges to the point where they leave.

I wasn't calling their bluff, it was either drop the £49 or lose me as a customer. They chose not to drop the charge so i took my business elsewhere. Customer loyalty isn't something Virgin seem to be that bothered about.

Nano
 
nano said:
I had been a customer for well over 5 years without missing one payment which doesn't seem to matter to Virgin Media.
Click to expand...

With modern business, they don't have any interest in customer loyalty, so you can be the perfect customer, but you will never get anything back for being reliable, so shopping around is what you'll have to get used to, for everything from TV services to energy suppliers...
 
Curiously, that appears no longer to be the case with Savings Products: I have found that Account Providers are consistently giving higher rates to legacy customers than to new - and, to keep right on Topic, Virgin Money are included in that. Applies both to Instant Access accounts with expired "Bonuses" and to Matured Bonds.

This has been a pleasant surprise to me, as I depend upon Investment Returns to keep t'wolf from t'door.
 
nano said:
In all honesty I did argue over the price and got no where, plus you pay one month in front with Virgin anyway so that would have been irrelevant. The way i look at it is why should i pay them a £25 deposit when i was already paying them nearly £80 a month to start with and if they had installed the new Tivo i would have been locked into a 12 month contract so they would have been quids in anyway?

I had been a customer for well over 5 years without missing one payment which doesn't seem to matter to Virgin Media.

To be honest it was p**s poor service if you ask me, there was no room for any negotiation, it was either pay the £49 or don't have a second Tivo box. Even Sky have more leeway when it comes to negotiations about price. Every year for the last three years i have managed to get Sky to considerably drop their prices to one i'm happy to pay. This doesn't happen with Virgin. Not dropping the £49 charge has cost them over a £1000 a year in lost business. They obviously think they are big enough to risk p**sing their customers off with their extortionate charges to the point where they leave.

I wasn't calling their bluff, it was either drop the £49 or lose me as a customer. They chose not to drop the charge so i took my business elsewhere. Customer loyalty isn't something Virgin seem to be that bothered about.

Nano
Click to expand...

Thats odd..... I only paid £25 for the install of my second Tivo and that included moving a bog standard V HD box and thinking about it that wasn't for the install, that was for the activation, at first I think they wanted £75 for the install and activation but I told them outright if they wanted the commission for signing me up they'd better do something as I wasn't paying £75 and after a bit of umming and ahhrrring he come back and knocked £10 off the monthly bill, cut the install/activation down to £25, gave me the extra Tivo and moved the extra HD box (installed a new feed to the back bedroom) and threw in 1000 minutes on the landline

And they had my credit limit increased to £150 when they were on the phone

I wonder if its because the retentions department is local to me (its only down the way in Stockton) so when they hear a local accent they might be "looking after their own" if you like?

I know a bloke who works in the VM retentions department but I've yet to speak to him at work lol, he reckons that they are authorised to do anything at all to keep custom, even going as far as giving you your basic services free for 6 month (incoming calls, 10meg internet and basic TV channels) just so they can lock you into a fresh 18 month contract, he said for every fresh contract or service change/upgrade they get paid what builds up to a good monthly commission so they'll do anything to keep you

With VM the thing to remember is, if you get nowhere today, ask for a manager, if that doesnt work, ring them back tomorrow and try again
 
Too late for me to do that now. I'm just happily knocking the crap out of my VM broadband broadband before its switched off. By my own estimates I'm getting near 600GB this month already.

I've just setup the Now TV box for my daughter to use so that should knock the crap out of the broadband too. Nothing like getting value for money :-lmao
 
When I could get VM, CS service was awful. Internet was awful, randomly going down every few weeks for anything from a few hours to a few days. For someone who works from home a lot, Internet is a necessity rather than a commodity, so cannot afford to have it not working.

Never had TV with them - only phone and Internet, which, as nano says, was throttled beyond belief.

I am glad I can't actually get it now... Will never use VM again.
 
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