As some who works in the “non-for profit” sector and considers that we deliver pretty good quality services to the public (not always perfect I admit). It is often very trying to put up with the nonsense from the Tory press about how awful public services are in this country and how wonderful things would be if everything was PLC rather than supposedly PC.However, even the most unresponsive, expensive, badly run, rude, arrogant and inefficient public services in the world now have a favourable comparator in Virgin Media.
I posted recently on the completely useless service I had received from Virgin Media. Even at the time I thought that I had just been a little misfortune. After all, these things happen don't they in the best of companies? My Virgin broadband had stopped working and the company had refused to allow me to use their dial up service. At the time of the last post I had actually managed to get on line via their dial up service despite the melody of fibs I had been told. The dial up service (slowly) cost me about £100 extra in charges for the time I was off broadband. I was “offered” £30 in compensation. However, it all got even worse afterwards. I took time off work to be available for an appointment for an engineer to attend my home only for it to be cancelled by a text message on the grounds that the problem will be solved via the network. Of course that did not happen so I had to ring again and was told to wait another week since it was not a network problem and an engineer needs to attend at home.
A manager was suppose to ring me to apologise and see if a weekend appointment could be organised for an engineer to attend - but of course no one rang me. I think that I was told that a manager would ring me on 6 separate occasions but they never did. While waiting for an engineer to call I tried my Internet connection and it suddenly started to work. So it was a network problem all the time. Did anyone ring to offer an apology or explanation? No, of course not. To be clear nearly all front line staff I spoke to were apologetic and tried to be helpful they but incapable of doing anything positive by the company rules. The one manager I actually spoke to was by far the most arrogant and smug person that I have spoken to in a such a long, long while. His attitude was basically that Virgin Media was such a wonderful company with such great products that I should be just grateful for being even allowed to pay (through the nose) for its products.
Hmmm. I can honestly say that we don’t get things right all the time in public services but I have never, ever experienced such an incompetent, unresponsive, uncaring and inefficient service as I have from Virgin Media. I suspect that the overriding reason for this is that they are in a monopoly situation for most of their customers. It is difficult and time consuming to switch services if you are a cable customer. So they milk it as much as they can. There is an important lesson to learn for those who believe that privatisation is the answer for public services. It is clearly not.
The UK economy is going to be increasingly dependent on efficient and responsive broadband services. Virgin has failed to rise to the challenge and on the evidence I have seen, it is institutionally incapable of doing so.
Oftel must break up the Virgin Media monopoly to enable real competition and improve services for its captive customers. Nationalisation is probably the only real alternative to being broken up.
The bearded one is obviously more interested in other things than customer service.
Check out "Which" recommended Zen Internet and BE Internet.
