Virgin On The Ridiculous Part Four – The Netflix Debacle

I last wrote about my experiences with Virgin Media way back in April 2016 after their umpteenth unsuccessful attempt to connect my property (you can read about that, and VM’s previous attempts here). That, I thought, was that: It wasn’t.

 

I cannot now remember how I managed to get myself talked into another attempt to have Virgin Media installed– I’m sure it must have been they who initiated contact with me, and that in a state of bloody mindedness, I allowed them to have another go in the fairly certain knowledge that it would be an abject failure. If I knew then what I know now, I don’t think I would have bothered.

 

On the 30^th March 2017 two men arrived in a van, armed with a giant reel of cable and the optimism of men who had not previously been beaten in their attempts to connect me. After they had announced their arrival, I retreated indoors and let them get on with it, confident that they would soon be admitting defeat. About twenty minutes later they rang the doorbell, and, much to my surprise, told me that the cable was now in place.

Cable installed! Only took five years.

For some time, all was well. Broadband speeds were good, and to Virgin’s credit, the service was pretty reliable with very few outages, and I now had loads of new TV channels.

 

Over time however, dissatisfaction set in. Before 2017 I had not given much thought to streaming services or catch-up TV as the broadband speeds I was getting often made it a slow and frustrating experience, added to which was a lack of content that I was particularly interested in. As the years passed however, streaming services and catch-up TV increasingly became part of my TV viewing experience. For all Virgin's much vaunted number of channels,  there were very few that I was interested in that were not available through Freeview.

 

Companies like Virgin penalise customers whose loyalty you would think they would reward - the so called loyalty penalty - relying on customer inertia to accept annual prices rises. This often stems from a reluctance to switch suppliers, usually driven by the hassle that comes with such a change. I was as guilty of this as anyone, and by the middle of 2024 I realised that I was paying way too much money for a TV package that was effectively Freeview. In addition, I was paying subscriptions to Prime Video and Apple TV.

 

I therefore decided to dispense with my TV package and limit my subscription with Virgin to broadband (and the now nearly forgotten landline, as cutting it off wasn’t going to save me any money and we still received the odd call now and then on that number). But before I was able to do that, we had to deal with the Netflix Debacle.

 

We were not subscribed to Netflix but were interested in watching The Dropout, the drama series about Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, the company that claimed to have devised revolutionary blood testing equipment, which Netflix were showing. Our daughter offered us guest membership to her Netflix account so that we could watch the series, and for the first couple of episodes, this worked seamlessly. Then one fateful Saturday afternoon, when we tried to watch an episode, we somehow, accidentally, found ourselves subscribed to Netflix, and not for the basic package either, but for the Premium package at a princely £17.99 a month.

 

I immediately contact Virgin – via WhatsApp – and was assured that Netflix was cancelled and that I would not be billed. You won’t be surprised to learn that my next bill included a £17.99 charge for Netflix. I then embarked on a series of calls to Virgin – seven in all from August through to November – in which their inefficiency and ineffectiveness was astounding.

 

Just about the only thing that Virgin managed to get right was cancelling my TV contract and sending the packaging to return my TiVo box. Each and every month from August to November they refunded me for the previous month’s Netflix subscription but charged me again. I spoke to Zed, Aysha, Tista, Dave, Salma, Chris, Wilkie, and Beverley (not all of those spellings may be right) who all promised that Netflix would be cancelled but failed to deliver. I also spoke to Tyler, who told me that my subscription could only be cancelled by Netflix and that I should ring them. “I’m your customer, not Netflix’s, they won’t speak to me,” I told him and putting him on hold, I phoned Netflix. “You’re not our customer, we can't speak to you,” they told me, “only Virgin can cancel the subscription.”

 

At one point I received a call from a manager in customer services. He was not interested in my problem or in fixing it, but just wanted to understand why – when I’d been asked to provide feedback -  I had been less than complimentary about Virgin's customer service. He seemed to think that I should have known more about Virgin’s systems and procedures than the customer service representative I had spoken to. At one point he accused me of being unreasonable. “If you think I’m unreasonable, you should speak to my wife,” I said, handing the phone to Val.

 

Matters reached a head when we entered the latter stages of our house move. Virgin told me that to disconnect my services before the end of the billing cycle I would have to pay a disconnection fee, which I wasn’t prepared to do. So, they said that they would have to bill me the whole amount for one month, even though I’d only be connected for a few days, and that they would part refund me – by cheque! - within 42 days. I told them that that wasn’t going to happen and if they billed me the whole month, I would stop the Direct Debit and they could send me a bill, for which I would pay only what I deemed appropriate. As it transpired, they didn’t bill me and to their credit, they made me a payment for goodwill.

 

Like most organisations that rely on customer inertia, Virgin also seem to hope that when there are problems that they are unable or unwilling to fix - especially around billing - customers will give up complaining, write it off to experience, and accept the charges.

 

No doubt Virgin are no worse than other suppliers and I’m sure that customers of Sky, Talk Talk, EE, 3 and BT et al can all recount similar tales of woe. The measure of any organisation – whether it’s your broadband supplier, mobile phone company, energy provider, or bank – isn’t how they perform when things are going well, but how they react when problems arise, as I know full well from having worked in customer services in HSBC for many years. Virgin failed miserably in this respect; it should not take four months and seven phone calls totalling more than ten hours to fix a straightforward problem, but it did. The only good thing I can say about Virgin’s customer service is that I rarely had to wait more than a few minutes before being connected to someone whenever I phoned them; it all went downhill once I was connected though.

 

Having finally moved house –  a saga in itself which will be the subject of a blog in the near future – we now just have a broadband connection; no TV, no landline. I’ve had to phone our new ISP (Hyperoptic) twice since we were connected, both times about technical issues that they dealt with quickly and efficiently. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that that continues.