I am going to cut an extraordinarily long story short.
I had simultaneous pixelation problems on both TiVos for more than a year. Repeated calls to their (overseas I suspect) helpline always started out (after the long wait and authentication) with me having to give them the serials , turn a box off and on (reboot time > 5 minutes) and then them "running tests" which showed everything as normal. One time they insisted I change "the box" as it was "definitely faulty" (but then why was the other one failing too, and why can you not transfer my settings and recordings?)
Repeated engineer calls mostly resulted in an engineer showing up, either "running tests" and declaring it clean (despite being shown recordings with the problem), or changing all the cable ends, or some other testing and not being able to reproduce the problem.
I suggested to them (call centre and engineers) numerous times that they should change the cable running from the road to the house, as it had been in since we had cable installed more than 20 years ago and it fed both boxes so would be good to rule out.
Some time before it was fixed, I got so pee'd off with it that I called the cancellations people and raised a complaint, that each "new" event always started at the beginning of the fault finding flow chart and they never got past page 1, despite me asking for escalations. The cancellation people said they had raised a complaint and a manager would call me back in three days.
Unsurprisingly, they didn't, I ended up calling in again, getting a more receptive engineer, who changed the cable and the problem was fixed. That was a few weeks ago. I was going to leave it there.
Yesterday I received a letter. It started out saying we have been trying to contact you but "have not been able to reach you on your contact numbers.". None of those numbers have missed calls or messages. That really got my back up, no need to lie was there! It gave me a complaint ref number and asked me to text the number to a phone number where "a member of our messenger team will contact you".
So about 14:30 yesterday I did it, expecting to speak with someone fairly quickly. But no! It was an automated service. It didn't recognise the complaint number and went through asking for my name, account number and phone number which iy still didn't recognise and it said it would put me onto a person who can help. At 16:58 Aruna turned up on the same text sequence and promised to resolve my complaint but presumably as he couldn't see the preceding messages we had to go through name, number rtc again.
So we hadn't even got properly going, as he was obviously dealing with stuff other than me, and within about 20 minutes he sent a message "I will now be returning this conversation to the queue as it is the end of my shift. Do not worry. We will pick it up and respond back to you as soon as possible". I immediately asked "will we be carrying out this entire escalation by text" but got no reply.
Today at 07:04 "Good morning, apologies for keeping you waiting (!!!), we just wanted to know if you still wanted some help with your query. Please type Yes or No." I didn't respond Yes till 10:49 as I had other stuff to do, and their response was "Hi, I'm Virgin Media's Virtual Assistant, how can I help you?" and we went through the whole repeat of it not recognising me and eventually at 13:36 I got exchanging texts with Shweta who "can certainly help me today". Beforehand I had called Vitrin again and spoke to a UK person and just asked them to log the issue in my record, so I can refer to it later if required.
Shweta tried his/her best to empathise and help, with their limited English, but as we weren't going to get anywhere I decided to let them off the hook and just ask to confirm that my earlier call was in my record. It was. Shweta said he/she fully understood how I felt. They summarised the issue (wrongly really) which I said yeah, thanks, bye and Shweta said "I am raising a complaint to capture your dissatisfaction..." and gave me a complaint number, at which I fell off my chair laughing.
So there it is. I am going to complain properly and part of the point of typing it here was so I can then copy paste to a formal complaint - probably OFCOM or something. I have screen shots of nearly all of the text exchanges. I'm not even really sure what the complaint is now but I've wasted enough time already that another short time won't help.
I've also currently got incompetence type issues with my local doc surgery (getting a prescription issued - 4 attempts so far) and Accor hotels (refunds not yet made for cancellations in July), and Asda opticians haven't called me back as they said they would on a fairly significant matter. I expect you all think I'm mad but I think I'm still sane and still not really a complainer - yet I don't even think any of it can be blamed on the pandemic.
Thank you for reading. Have a Great Day (as Shweta signed off!) :-)
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Virgin media complaints procedure short v.. new
Virgin media complaints procedure short.. new