ISP Virgin Media Business UK Launch Flexible Broadband Plans
New customers of Virgin Media Business (VMO2) can, from today, now choose to take one of their new Flex offerings, which enables small businesses to move either up or down between different “VOOM Fibre” broadband package options (i.e. customers can “flex” or change their package every 30 days).
Apparently the goal is to ensure that customers can “have the speed that they want, when they need it.” Flex means that VOOM Fibre broadband customers can select to “go up to any level” on the package tiers, or they can go “down one level from their originally contracted package“, while paying the stated price of the new tier. The catch obviously being that reduced flexibility to downgrade several levels.
The other catch is that if you want to do this then VMO2 won’t make it possible via a simple online account selector, no, that would be too easy for a modern internet communication company. Instead, a customer who wants to do this will have to manually “call” their “Care” (support) team to change their Voom tier.
Advertisement
In addition, you cannot switch from a monthly broadband product to a monthly broadband bundle or vice versa. If you choose to do this, you will have to sign a new contract. The fixed price guarantee on their packages also excludes promotional offer periods, add-on prices or usage fees, which is fairly normal.
Chris Holmes, Director of SOHO at Virgin Media O2, said:
“At Virgin Media O2, we are committed to providing our small business customers with broadband packages that give them the flexibility that they need. A small business customer is able to flex their service, ramping up their broadband to deal with added traffic or flexing it down as they see fit. With the UK’s fastest widely available broadband for businesses, a fixed price guarantee while in contract, and our all-new Flex proposition, Virgin Media O2 Voom fibre broadband offers a winning combination of propositions for small businesses.”
End.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
As Mark so expertly articulated it’s a good feature but that a customer can’t change their tier online is laughable.
I’m surprised there isn’t an online form to raise the speed, and call to downgrade option, very much like for residential customers
Shouldn’t really have to call to downgrade either. Downgrading under contract is a part of the terms and conditions of the product, it’s the selling point.
Hopefully they’ll get it sorted so that this can go onto the customer portal.
I agree it shouldn’t be a call to downgrade either, it’s just I’m used to companies having an easy upgrade flow but more difficult downgrade flow.
I think this will end up biting virgin. If you take out a new contract you may as well go for slowest and then upgrade, as you can then downgrade later. However making it more difficult to upgrade may mean that people don’t bother as they realise actually 100 meg is more than enough, we don’t need the 500 after all
They’ll never offer downgrades via a web form or portal. It’ll be just the same as VM residential, where any option that doesn’t involve an up-sell requires calling VM’s grim call centres so they can make the downgrade process worse, slower, more time consuming, and have the opportunity to retain the customer on a higher tier, try for a cross-sell, or if nearing the end of a fixed-term try for a contract renewal on a measly discount because the customer has no leverage until the fixed term has ended.
VM aren’t alone in this respect – most large telcos seem to pride themselves in having the most backward customer service legally possible, driven by a 1990’s call centre mindset. It would be trivially easy to implement a full service customer portal for companies of this scale, enabling customers to join, leave, upgrade, downgrade, add or remove package elements, terminate, move house, re-contract without any staff intervention. That would remove the innumerable mistakes, delays, confusion, and customer dissatisfaction problems that customers encounter, whilst for the operators it would reduce the costs of call centre operations, the costs of complaints and adjudications, the management challenge of workforce scheduling, training, recruitment, regulatory compliance.
But until the senior management are cleansed of those suffering call centre brain we’ll not see any change.
This all looks good. I’ve never seen VM do a MGS before – nice to see
https://www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk/help-and-advice/products-and-services/speed-code-of-practice/