SPIN ON IT

There are times when only the phrase "what a bloody nerve" will do. Cast your mind back, faithful reader, to the great Broadband outage of 2008. Virgin Media responded with little more than a "are we bovvered" when I rang to complain. 4 days I had to wait for an engineer. 4 days! The customer service manager promised to call me back with an update but never did. The whole thing sucked big time. As we are moving house, it was a good excuse to give Virgin the finger and cancel the account, which I have. When I rang to cancel I was immediately offered £20 a month off my bill which I refused, because if they can do it now why didn't they always offer a cheaper service. And look what arrived today.



Aww, a cutesy little Virgin eye mask, and a glossy brochure telling me that I can change my mind, and everything will be better. Cheaper. Faster. It just confirms even more that I was right to cancel. If they went to half the effort with existing customers as they do trying to stop people leaving maybe they wouldn't need glossy brochures. It costs a lot more to attract new customers than keep current ones, and Virgin really should pay some attention to that. When you ring to report a fault, you go to a call centre in India. When you ring to cancel, you go through to Glasgow.

To top it off, a letter arrived addressed to "The lucky new occupier" which made me suspicious. It was a 'welcome pack' from Virgin saying hi and good luck in your new home which is already supplied with Virgin Media. That's going in the bin, next to the eye mask. Sleep on it? No thanks.