Which? Shames Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK for Poor Customer Service
Consumer magazine Which? has today written to the CEOs of Virgin Media (O2), Scottish Power and British Gas in the hope of “urging them to improve their customer service“, which comes after a survey conducted by the magazine found all three to be the “worst broadband and energy firms for customer service.”
According to the Yonder survey of 4,101 nationally representative adults, which was conducted in May 2024 with the aim of identifying the worst firms for customer service and where they are falling short – consumers in the UK are “most satisfied” with financial services for overall customer service, which leads with a net satisfaction score of +72. But energy and broadband is a bit.. different.
By comparison, energy and broadband remained two of the worst performing sectors for customer service – with net satisfaction in customer service interactions in energy and broadband at +51 and +52 respectively. Sadly, Virgin Media was crowned the “worst performing broadband firm” – receiving +29 for overall customer service, which is well below the sector average of +52.
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The survey itself asked respondents about several aspects of customer service, including how long it took to get in touch with someone who could help, the variety of contact options available, how seriously the customer service representative took an issue and how well the issue was resolved.
Sadly, Virgin Media received “dismal scores” across the board – scoring just +18 for how long it took to get in touch with someone who could help and +38 for both how well customers’ issues were dealt with and how well queries were resolved. By comparison, Plusnet appeared to do somewhat better in the survey, although annoyingly Which? didn’t include any results from the other major ISPs.
Some 50% of Virgin’s customers also experienced at least one customer service issue – most commonly waiting a long time on the phone to speak to an advisor (51%), being passed between departments without a helpful response (36%) and speaking to unhelpful or dismissive advisors (34%).
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Rocio Concha, Which? Director of Policy and Advocacy, said:
“Our research lays bare the dire state of customer service – with some companies simply not up to scratch.
Virgin Media, Scottish Power and British Gas remained the worst performing broadband and energy firms for customer service. It is never OK for firms to provide sub-standard customer service, but in essential sectors providing vital services millions rely on every day such as energy and broadband, it is completely unacceptable.
We have written to all three firms about their consistently poor performance in our research. Which? is calling on them to give consumers the customer service they deserve and clearly communicate the steps they are taking to improve.”
The fact that Virgin Media has done so poorly in this survey probably won’t come as too much of a surprise to ISPreview’s readers. Ofcom’s separate Q4 2023 consumer complaints study (here) similarly found that the provider managed to attract the most gripes for broadband, phone and pay TV services (O2 also did the same for mobile).
In addition, Ofcom also have a number of investigations open with the provider, such as their probe into problems with customer cancellations (here) and digital phone migrations (here).
A Virgin Media spokesperson said:
“We are making real changes across our business to deliver customer service improvements and we’re already seeing tangible results that wouldn’t be reflected in this old survey from Which? that, incidentally, represents less than 0.01% of our customer base.
We have boosted the number of agents, including in specialist teams that handle the most complex issues, and are investing more money in customer-facing areas of the business. We’re also multi-skilling our teams, transforming our IT systems and improving our digital tools, including through new technology that will solve customers’ issues even before they report a fault.
While change can take time, this programme of targeted investment has already seen us reduce average call waiting times to just two minutes, and last year 95% of customer complaints were resolved first time. We’re continuing to focus on removing pain points and delivering the best possible service to our customers.”
Suffice to say that the provider is in danger of establishing a negative reputation within the market, which is something that can be very difficult to unpick once such experiences become ingrained within the consumer subconscious (TalkTalk has had similar challenges in the past). But it is good to see that the provider has been making practical improvements on this front. Hopefully we’ll see this effort being reflected in future surveys.
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.
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VMo2 are beyond dismal and it’s distasteful of them to be dismissive of the survey as old. Shame on them.
The survey was conducted between 3 and 15 May 2024. The two months since then is probably not far off the average time it takes VMO2 to deal with a complaint
This is a real shame, I am paying £69.00 only for Gigabit Broad Band. I feel a bit ” ripped off” to be fair, I’ve also had a few connectivity issues going on and it took ages to get through to Customer services. We luckily have a new Fibre to the home coming along soon which gives a synchronous up / down of 900 mbps so I will be going with them as soon as thier infrastructure hits my area, being as I can then upstream games more efficiently. This is offered at only £29.99. I did phone virgins retention team, the best they could offer is £63.00
It’s what happens when you use overseas call centres.
Agreed, not just call centres but all industry in general, offshoring is bad.
Offshoring isn’t about making things cheaper, its about being legally allowed to exploit people. There will be experts in CS based in India, but VM won’t pay for it. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I don’t blame the overseas CS for being rubbish, they probably aren’t paid enough to care.
Can confirm Virgin Media are terrible. I had packet loss and random disconnection issues for months and 5+ service visits later, the issue remained. Thankfully, I was out of contract and could switch ISPs.
It’s too true, and regardless of what the customer services do, in some scenarios there are technical issues that just aren’t getting addressed. I left VMO2 after years of being a happy customer as their network is faulty in the south west. You can randomly have great signal, but data won’t work. I mean not even a ping can transmit. This was happening all over between Exeter, Exmouth, and Sidmouth. It occurred to everyone I knew on VMO2 and over a period of 9 months I was reporting this as frequently as I could with any network diagnostics I could provide from my devices. And VMO2 would always take a few days to reply then state they couldn’t see anything wrong.
Approaching a year on EE now with the same device and it hasn’t happened once with them.
In such scenarios, what can customer services do when the backbone of their product is broken?
“the provider is in danger of establishing a negative reputation within the market”
It’s too late for that. VM already have a negative reputation in the market, and I’m not just talking about people on here who have an interest in these things. On social media, it is not uncommon to see people asking for advice on better ISPs to switch away from VM. I don’t see posts asking for advice on switching away from other ISPs.
Not surprised by this result. VM’s call centre must be the worst in the industry. Never have I been lied to many many times. Thankfully there are a few good eggs, but generally you have to prepare yourself for the worst.
Customer service seems to be a dying thing these days, larger companies certainly don’t care, even if they say they do. As for ISPs, the sad thing is most of them use a script and if you go away from that script, they are stuffed.
Even the smaller providers and Alt networks have problems with CS, my ISP by all accounts don’t have a great customer service, the couple of times I have contacted them, it has been ok.
Plusnet CS was good, far better than the company that owns them, at least they would listen and apart from having a broad Yorkshire accent, most of the time I could understand them.
Having CS aboard is not good, it is cheap, no doubt paying these poor people a pittance.
This country needs to get back to what customer service used to be about, but I don’t see it happening.
Hilarious. Virgin have no shame.
My parents (which made it my problem) and someone else I know have had issues with their abysmal CS.
In both cases they repeatedly messed up their contract renewals.
Their field engineers from my experiences have been good, just their call centre staff who have caused me nothing but grief, one of the few times an AI might actually be an improvement.
Not sure if a free sausage roll makes up for the hassle.
Well, as always, this is why it’s worth paying a little extra to be with the best, such as A&A. If you ever need to, you can actually speak to a proper technical person within a single call! And this is why I stick with cranky old VDSL, because my only alternative is Virgin Media. The wait for FTTP goes on and on, and it seems we’ll be the last in the South West to get it (despite being in a city next to the M5!).
A&A is not a little extra, even if the cost is the same you have a limit on data use, of 1TB, we have got away from that sort of thing years agao, traffic management and that sort of rubbish. 500Mb/s for £75.00 na month, that is download only if on Openreach network it will be a lot less going up and for that price you have 10TB of data usage. May seem a lot, but not in this day and age with video use and other stuff, certainly if you have a family
fine if you can cope with that, maybe you think it is worth it, but it is not just a bit more expensive, even BT charge less at £50 a month.
While I agree that sometimes paying more for a decent service is good, sadly A&A is out of the reach of most people and sadly still stuck in the old days of managed data.
but then A&A are not in the same market as most other providers.
Thankfully I’ve never had an issue with my service, although it’s inevitable I will do one day – there are just literally no other viable options at my property. The reason I switched to Virgin in the first place was because of countless issues with the FTTC service.
Similar situation here. Nexfibre XGS-PON just went live here last week (rural Leicestershire). Prior to this, we only had Openreach’s monopoly to choose from with VDSL2 packages topping out at just 76 Mb/s downlink, 18.5 Mb/s uplink.
With XGS, we now have access to 2 Gb/s symmetrical. My install date isn’t for another 3 weeks, but I’m hoping I don’t get any issues.
One thing is for sure; Nexfibre’s move to wholesale can’t come soon enough.
I very nearly signed up as they had just rolled out via nexfibre and were offering 1Gig with the upload add on for £30pm – got all the way through the sign up with the doorstep seller passed checks but then said the area manager had decided all new signups in his area needed to email proof of ID to complete the order – I refused and said I’ve never needed to show proof of ID before.
Shonky service from a sub par company, Virgin has been terrible in my firsthand experience since Liberty took over. I left over two years ago to join 4g mobile broadband and it’s a fraction of the price. I sacrifice the stability as it needs an occasional reboot but that’s the only downside. When I was leaving Virgin it took over an hour to speak to someone, then I was transferred several times before my cancellation request was taken. Then the equipment return was lost and thank goodness I had proof of sending it (I took a video of packaging their router up and that saved me from a huge bill). Liberty are just using this as a cash cow, BT flirted with outsourcing and eventually saw the light when customer numbers plummeted. I can see the same happen here, Liberty won’t care until the altnets poach their customers then they’ll listen. If customers stay then expect no change, I wouldn’t go back to them.
If you can get Customer Service to answer a call, they are knowledgeable and helpful.
They insist on charging old and established customers over twice as much as new customers. Which is a disgrace. You can threaten to leave and they will reduce the monthly charge, only to increase it again so within months you are back paying double,
I have never had a foreigner answer the phone, and always they resolve any issue quickly. Recently I had a router problem and the customer service spent a long time on the phone testing everything until we both decided that the router was the problem, He arranged for the latest router to be sent to me 2 days later, and the problem was solved.
You’ve been very lucky. For several years I was a superuser helping customers through their online help forum, and the performance of the telephone agents was regularly reported as abysmal (and indeed it was on the occasions when I had to report problems). Customer service agents would often lie to customers, invent answers themselves when they didn’t know, or simply terminate calls they couldn’t handle. Virgin Media know this full well, they do monitor their online reputation, but they are a truly awful company and just don’t care.
They had my business for 20+ years because for that time they had the only fast broadband offer in my area. No thanks, no appreciation of customer loyalty (to be fair this concept only exists within customers’ heads). As soon as FTTP was available I left and am now a happy customer of Aquiss.
There is no circumstance where I would ever be a customer of either VM or O2, no offer, no low price, no promise of service would ever tempt me back. To an extent, VMO2 are in the same position with me as the Tory party – too many years of failure to deliver, too many years of looking after their on interests, too many years of incompetence, self absorbtion.
But each to their own, if it works for you and you’re getting good service, that’s great. But I won’t be coming back. There’s a thought for the company, when you alienate customers who have been with you for longer than many of your customer service agents have been alive, what future if there for such a company?
VM are a disgrace. However, alternative ‘broadband’ is non-existent in DH8 7RL, nor any other fibre providers. Liberty will f*ck them up even more.
Offshore CS should be banned. We want in UK call centre. This is the reason my smaller ISP UnchainedISP is based UK customer support and answered within 5 minutes by ticket. Best ISP by mile ahead. Plusnet are ok but can do better.
“Liberty are just using this as a cash cow, BT flirted with outsourcing and eventually saw the light when customer numbers plummeted. I can see the same happen here, Liberty won’t care until the altnets poach their customers then they’ll listen. If customers stay then expect no change, I wouldn’t go back to them.”
Everyone around here has shifted from Virgin Media to altnets. Virgin have knocked doors to try and get customers back.
When dealing with vile Virmin entities I find it helps to set up the Ouija board, draw a large pentagram on the floor, sit in it and call C.S. after which I burn 3 tonnes of sage – works for me.
There’s a very valid reason why smaller providers are focusing on delivering better customer service. As soon as you simply pay attention to your customers, you’re already better than Virgin. Rebel Internet, Community Fibre, two examples amongst many that truly take the CS mission seriously
No shock , they are literally the worst company I have ever dealt with. Soon as contract up I will be leaving and never returning.
Liberty Global seem basically desperate in sweating their operations hence the outsourcing rubbish. Their share price is about half what it was 10 years ago and even worse compared to its 2015 peak. Try reading reviews of their other European operations, Sunrise Switzerland, UPC Slovakia, Telenet Belgium, VodafoneZiggo Netherlands. Their customers slate these operations online in the same way Virgin are slated in the UK. It’s a real shame, I was involved in the industry years ago and was invited to a headend opening. It was beautiful, efficient, well designed, resilient, with engineers who cared and were in constant contact with fault management to identify trends and resolve issues quickly. I can categorically state my problems with the company coincided with Liberty taking over and the complaints many post on here are as a result of Liberty’s working practices. The only hope for them is to sell up to someone else and that day won’t come too soon.
The problem for/with Virgin Media is that for a very very long time in a great many areas, if you wanted more than 90mbit DSL many people had no choice except to go with VM. They knew this of course, and it’s why they were able to charge such huge prices for their internet service and also to give extremely poor outsourced support.
Thankfully, that is now changing. I note that VM are saying they’re making big changes in their support. It’s likely because the altnets and finally openreach have given them a big kick up the backside to make them. They’re not doing it because they suddenly decided ok lads it’s time to give customers good support now. No. They’ve been forced into it. For me, I left them more than a year ago and actually went back to slow DSL because I can’t work with an ISP who tells me to turn it off and on again or when I tell them i’m not using WiFi but i’m using Ethernet they suggest that I move the router somewhere else.
VM have been dragged kicking and screaming into providing better support and more reliable service. It’s not a bad thing, but it shows their utter reluctance to spend. Only to take. Also, according to my neighbour down the road, it’s still virtually impossible to leave them unless you want to have a 1hr phone call / whatsapp slagging match.
I was with VM for 20 years as no viable alternative where I lived for my high bandwidth usage, as soon as any FTTP provider arrived two months ago I was gone. The quality of the connection wasn’t even any good, huge latency spikes were common, as were router issues and complete outages at least once every couple of months. Two of us working from home, it was so unreliable I kept a cheap backup line with fail over. They even disconnected me a couple years ago to connect my neighbours that were new customers, cable from box on my house over the fence to theirs. Just glad I never have to deal with VM again, good riddance.
All the companies are shirt so who gives a crap
My new build property was prewired for VM and Openreach. I am currently with LeetLine/No One/Trunk Networks (they went through some restructuring) and they are the best ISP I have ever had, hands down. Static IPv4 address, static IPv6 block, and most importantly a real network engineer at the end of the support line (often the same person).
The few times I’ve needed help, I’ve been able to send them PPPoE logs and we’ve been able to diagnose issues together. When the issue is Openreach’s, they’ve been the only ISP I’ve ever had to truly follow up with OR and keep them in check to make sure they turn up and fix the problem. Real ownership and customer service, even when the issue is out of their hands.
Oh, and I pay them £50/mo for gigabit. Not the cheapest, but the quality of the customer service (and Internet service) is excellent. I can’t recommend them enough.
I believe they also have a City Fibre offering too but I’m not on that network.
It’s literally essential for Virgin and BGas to onshore again and pass the cost onto customers. The cost is a penny on the pound and they would retain me if they do so. Many jobs were lost locally in Southampton recently from both companies offshoring. I’m sick of offshoring and I’m more than willing to pay a penny in every pound for all my utilities to be back in the UK.
The only time you get anyone to talk to at Virgin media is when you are leaving,they are like a rash all over you.
Good, but they are on par with most telco’s in the country right now to be fair.
Maybe the 91500 people rating VM 1.5 on Trustpilot is a more representative of your customer base. 66% of reviews rate them 1 star with the last update 12 hours ago. Doesn’t look like any tangible improvements are being realised yet as the dropped from a 1.6 to 1.5 rating in the last 3 weeks. Worthless company.
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.virginmedia.com
Their CS is indeed disgraceful. Really. But their practices when you try to cancel should be downright illegal. You tell them you want to quit, they want to talk to you about deals etc. Now OK, that’s not the worst thing in the world and in fact some people use it to get a better deal. Fine. But when you’ve told the person on the other end of the phone/chat 10 times no, I want to quit, please carry out my wishes and you get yes ok but your new ISP they can’t guarantee speed, we can, who is your new ISP… followed by another 30 minutes of begging to quit. This should be illegal. I can imagine many people will just give in especially older folk who might feel intimidated by it.
They really should do something about this practice.
Moved home to a new build house and went with virgin, they said it could be done within a week, just a day before the installation date the extended a month, I tried to cancel and they said they’ll do it within a week (Indian call centre), I asked for email proof and they never sent it…
It took 3 attempts to cancel, I don’t have any email receipts to prove it l, just screenshotted chat logs. Absolutely terrible company.
Went with BT and they had me up and running within a week.
Leaving VM after 29 years. Terrible customers service and they do not know what they are talking about half the time. VM are useless.
Thankfully I haven’t had to use VM customer service for issues whether online or on the phone for a very long time and if I did it was only because of packet loss of the signal strength is not right and both of them for me have been fine for years so far. When I needed help many years ago I always arranged for engineers to come via the forums because the phone support was horrific even then by asking you stupid questions when I know what needed to be done. Ever since they used to be NTL and I started as a customer around 2001 I’ve always used my own routers and stuck the ISP router in modem mode and out of all those 23yrs I’ve been extremely lucky and had extremely good reliability overall. I’ve always been on their top speed package and 24/7 all year round I get my full speed up and down thankfully.
Even if I wanted to switch I couldn’t at the moment because VM are the only high speed provider with 1 gig broadband, everyone else is around ADSL speeds that may get to 50Mbps if I was lucky. BT I think it was is supposed to install full fibre around my area by 2026 and I have no idea when VM will be upgrading my area to FTTP either so I won’t be seeing 2 gig symmetrical for a long time.
There’s another great post on LinkedIn showcasing the poor customer service https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rob-mellor-9ba49b23a_as-most-of-my-contacts-know-i-was-until-activity-7218702065747832832-04fH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
They seem to have got worse since they adopted a “Customer First” set of buzz words and made thousands of experienced staff redundant over the last year or so.
It’s time VMO2 looked at the Managed Service Provider (MSP) they use to deliver their support services as, from bitter experience, they are poorly trained on products, their is an inevitable barrier when it comes to technical support due to English not always being the analyst’s first language. Having run near shore (EU) support desks language and strong non-English accents can sometimes cause misunderstanding which can create big problems when it comes to technical support.
Whilst offshoring dramatically reduces the cost of delivering support, it can result in higher cost of retaining customers / recruiting new customers. The main problems are when your MSP doesn’t require sufficient level of proficiency in the language they are supporting, doesn’t sufficiently technically train their analysts and updates to products are not cascaded in a timely manner by their customer (in this case VMO2) and therefore the analysts don’t know a product exists or how to troubleshoot it. The failure to notify an MSP of new products or updates to products is something that impacts the whole industry. I can say from painful experience, it can sometimes be completely forgotten and only remedied when an end user calls for support and isn’t able to get it is the MSP finally made aware, usually following an escalation.
Now I am not excusing VMO2, they will have break points in their contract with whoever they have contracted to deliver support to their customer and is probably, given these scores something they should have done long ago. That said, changing to a new support provider can take a couple of years and, when support from the incumbent is so bad end users don’t call, it creates other problems. when the support provider is changed the new MSP often end up with incorrect contact volumes and therefore they are under-resourced, this is something specified in the contact and the problem continues until there is a chance to negotiate higher numbers of analysts with their customer (VMO2)… Something which will cost more…
That said, if VMO2 continue in the current direction nobody will want to touch them, however good their product offering is.
Virgin media are the worst. Overpriced and rely on paying customers to not realise how much money you can save by leaving. Virgin media bully there customers into paying ridiculous prices for services and when you call to tell them they pretend they care. They really don’t care. If they did they would actively tell there customers they are out of contract and could save money but they don’t. They just sit on it.
Calling them they then lie and tell you that you can’t save anything. Then when you threaten to leave all of a sudden they apply discounts.
Then when you finally leave they offer you the same price as a new customers.
Virgin media business model will be the fall of the company.
When the other fibre companies begin to really roll out then virgins days are over.
Trust me you dont need them. You don’t need what they try to bamboozle you with. They don’t even know how the internet actually works. They just hope to sound like what they are reading of a screen makes it sound like they do.
You can get it cheaper and better else where.
If virgin media actually cares, they would actively seek out those who are out of contract and reward loyalty but they don’t. I doubt they ever will.