Useless Virgin Mobile

[Sazzy]

Hi all, this is my first post here. I was hoping someone could give me advice on any way to deal with Virgin Mobile.

My husband has a contract phone with them. He has been with them for nearly 4 years now as they were the only ones who would give him a contract phone (his credit used to be really bad). They USED to be ok, but as time goes by they seem to be getting more and more ridiculous and we're fed up.:mad2:

The story is I just got a mobile phone contract from 3 on 18th June. When we got home, my husband helped me sort my new phone out and then tried to call it from his Virgin Mobile so that I could store his number. It said Call Barred. He tried to phone Virgin to sort it out, but Virgin was down for the weekend, doing some sort of maintenance so he had to wait til the Monday to do so. As he works away during the week, and relies on his mobile to keep in touch with me, this was quite a major thing to us. He was already having problems with his mobile disconnecting during calls when it switched from HSDPA to 3G, and this was just one more ordeal. Anyways, he rang them Monday and they said that their system was recognising the prefix on 3's mobile numbers as Premium Rate Numbers, so he was not allowed to ring my phone. He was really irate over this, but they said they should have it fixed by 28th June. He wanted to know what he was supposed to do in the meantime, but they were unhelpful.

He tried texting me and found that that did work, so we kept in touch via text and I would ring him. However, I checked his mobile account online and realised they were charging him 10p per text! This past Friday, he phoned them up to demand to know what was up with this and it ended up being a proper FIGHT on the phone. The woman, whoever she was, told him it was HIS responsibility to ring up 3 and find out what the problem was?! He said that it was not his place to do anything, VIRGIN was his service provider and whatever problems they were having with 3 had NOTHING to do with him! They refused to refund the cost of the texts, refused to do anything in fact, and when he wanted to cancel his contract, they refused that too! That is unless he wanted to pay £103 then and there. He has three months left of his 18 month contract...and his contract is £25 a month. So they wanted £75 + £28 on top to cancel? He told them that as far as he was concerned they were in breach of contract, because his contract states that he has 500 minutes and Unlimited Texts to ANY UK MOBILE NETWORK AND LANDLINE. So he should be able to text me AND phone me without incurring ANY cost. She still argued and said basically that it wasn't their problem and he needed to ring 3! He hung up on her and I made him try again and so he did and he got the same runaround, this time with a manager (apparently) who said the charges still stood and there was no opt out of his contract. I went to Ofcom's website and read that complaints had to be dealt with with the Service Provider first, so I sent an official complaint detailing what the problem was to Virgin via email. I'm still waiting, but I wanted to know if he has any grounds to cancel his contract at all. He went and got a contract with 3 this weekend because we can call each other for free, so he is no longer even using his mobile phone and won't be using them ever again. As a matter of fact, we're cancelling all the services we have with them which equates to about £1000 a year!

Personally, I don't see how being charged for what he's entitled to with his contract is legal??

Anyways, Thanks for listening to my rant! and for any replies.

Sazzy

[Sazzy]

Re: Useless Virgin Mobile

Hi again,

I know that nobody has responded, but just wanted to say that after reading around, I decided to email Neil Berkett myself.

Just over an hour later, I was shocked to see that he had replied! He said 'I am so sorry that we have let you down. I will get someone in my office to help.'

Sooo, we'll see how that pans out. I have to say though, that it goes a long way to soothing ruffled feathers when the CEO seems to actually CARE. I bet that if he were a fly on the wall of one Virgin's call centres he'd go absolutely scranny!

[Guest]

Re: Useless Virgin Mobile

Neil Berkett does tend to respond to emails and, superficially at least, does appear to care. However, do not expect anything to change at Virgin because they are a company staffed by morons with little or no interest in their customers.

There are plenty of Virgin threads on here and not many (if any) of them have a happy ending.

[Sazzy]

Re: Useless Virgin Mobile

Hi Cetelco,

Personally, I agree with you. Occasionally when I have to phone Virgin about something or other, I get someone who genuinely wants to help and does! But it's a rare occurrence. I've had to ring them up to sort my phone charges out two months in a row, and they WERE in error...it wasn't just me being awkward! The first time, the bloke said 'What do you want me to do about it?' to which I replied, 'Well you've overcharged me so obviously I want it refunded!' and the 2nd time I made it all the way to cancellations before someone decided to be bothered to correct it! Awesome customer service, that.

But I have to say that when everything is running smoothly and calls to Virgin aren't needed, I can't really fault their services. I rarely have any sort of problem with the broadband, telly, or phone. It's just a shame that when something DOES arise, you have to have a mental breakdown in order to get anything done about it!