The company has lost 182,000 broadband and 644,000 mobile customers in two years and is operating in an increasingly competitive market competition
My experience with their fibre service was bad customer service with very long waits, broken website and IT and a pricing model that meant you had to call them up every year to threaten them just to not get a 50% price increase. Service reliability was alright though.
After switching to Plusnet all of those problems went away, and I can get through to a person in less than a minute most of the time, and both times it has been someone in the UK. The price rises a small amount each year (£3 I think?). They have done some weird clerical errors though were they have accidentally cancelled my contract twice over the course of 2 years. Still better imo.
The UK telecoms company, which offers broadband, TV, landline and mobile services, had just announced £800m in cost savings, including potentially cutting up to a quarter of staff.
I’m not sure that will help with their main problems, at least where it comes to customer retention.
A pledge to focus on improving customer service, and developments including a new voice AI agent to handle broadband fault calls, has paid off.
In its results earlier this week, the company pointed to Ofcom’s latest data showing significant reductions in complaints across its business, and the lowest of any leading broadband provider.
I find that difficult to believe.
I know multiple people who after 10-20 years with them, they have tried to increase the price to 4x what a new customer would pay. They phone to complain and it’s cut to 3x. This is despite alternative fibre having been installed on their street so they switch to that. VM make no attempts to cut the price to something even close to reasonable.
I had Virgin Media broadband when I was a student from roughly 2013-2016. It was cheap because they were the only ISP at the time that didn’t bundle a phone line. It was unreliable, never hit advertised speeds and was throttled to all hell. The first time I called to cancel it, I discovered that their cancellation hotline (the only way to cancel) was offline for the entire day due to a ‘network upgrade’.
Recently a Virgin media salesperson came to my house to promote their new fiber network and when I told him I had been a customer for 3 years and thought the service was terrible he said he didn’t want to hear about it.
I wish them a very happy bankruptcy.
developments including a new voice AI agent to handle broadband fault calls
data showing significant reductions in complaints
🤔
Reductions in complaints because everyone who would complain has left instead.
In July, Virgin Media was fined a record £28m by telecoms regulator Ofcom after an investigation found millions of calls made by customers between January 2022 and September 2024 were probably mishandled.
The investigation showed that Virgin Media, which has repeatedly been among Ofcom’s most complained about companies in its quarterly reports, used deliberate tactics to repeatedly prevent customers from cancelling their contracts and moving to a new supplier.
