Surely they should have SOME technical knowledge?
Discussion
Virgin (techical) customer service. No doubt my bill is lower every month (I hadn't noticed) because their customer support is based in India.
My router died overnight on Sunday. I noticed by chance Monday morning because my phone said "wireless networks are available" when it should have been camped on mine, so I switched the router off / on, left for work and forgot about it. Got home Monday evening, and still no wi-fi. A quick peek at the router showed all of the lights on and flickering. This time, I paid attention as I switched it on - and immediately that it is switched on, the lights come on and flicker. It's clearly not even booting.
However, that clearly isn't in the script that is given to the customer support engineers - or at least, not the one Mustafa had.
We finally got an engineer booked to visit on Thursday evening, but I was told that "if it was a service problem common to my area, then the engineer would be cancelled". I pointed out that the router was clearly not even booting - but I'm pretty sure he didn't even understand what that meant. I also pointed out that if it was a problem with service in the area, I would still have wi-fi - but that didn't seem to click either.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that the nice Virgin man does turn up on Thursday with a new router under his arm. Not looking forward to remembering how I've got mine configured though!
My router died overnight on Sunday. I noticed by chance Monday morning because my phone said "wireless networks are available" when it should have been camped on mine, so I switched the router off / on, left for work and forgot about it. Got home Monday evening, and still no wi-fi. A quick peek at the router showed all of the lights on and flickering. This time, I paid attention as I switched it on - and immediately that it is switched on, the lights come on and flicker. It's clearly not even booting.
However, that clearly isn't in the script that is given to the customer support engineers - or at least, not the one Mustafa had.
We finally got an engineer booked to visit on Thursday evening, but I was told that "if it was a service problem common to my area, then the engineer would be cancelled". I pointed out that the router was clearly not even booting - but I'm pretty sure he didn't even understand what that meant. I also pointed out that if it was a problem with service in the area, I would still have wi-fi - but that didn't seem to click either.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that the nice Virgin man does turn up on Thursday with a new router under his arm. Not looking forward to remembering how I've got mine configured though!
Cotty said:
It will come back and bite them in the ass and we will all point and say we told you so.
I've been waiting for that day for a very long time. Trouble is there are all useless.Customer service counts for nothing when all is going well. When something goes wrong is the real test and who is going to agree that Sky, BT, Virgin, TalkTalk etc aren't all as bad as each other?
I was paying £60 a month (plus VAT) for 'amazing' business broadband that my IT provider insisted I have. It was copper and 4Mb/s on a good day. It was reliable and my IT people were happy. Until there was a problem, when nobody could care less. Customer service was dire. I dropped both of them and got fibre for less than half the price. Did either of them care they lost me as a customer? No.
There are too many punters and two few providers for any of them to have an incentive to do a good job. It just seems to be getting worse.
bimsb6 said:
Why would you still have wi fi ?
If it was an are problem the phone would still connect to the router, bit the router would have lost connection to the internet.To be honest these cheap call centers that work through a script might mean you spend a bit longer on the phone to them but it does do the job of filtering out common and easily fixed problems so that only the more serious issues go to the engineers to fix.
I've spoken to Virgin twice in the past week. Both times, I talked to a Scottish person (two different Scottish people), and both times they did all they could to resolve my issue.
First time, I told them my internet was dropping out randomly, for three or four minutes at a time. They told me they could see no issues at their end, so they'd send me a new hub.
The new hub arrived next day. I installed it as per the instructions, and the problem still exists. So I called them today to tell them so, and they have arranged to have an engineer here first thing tomorrow for as long as necessary to witness the fault, diagnose it, and hopefully rectify it.
No complaints from here, and no sign of an overseas call centre either.
First time, I told them my internet was dropping out randomly, for three or four minutes at a time. They told me they could see no issues at their end, so they'd send me a new hub.
The new hub arrived next day. I installed it as per the instructions, and the problem still exists. So I called them today to tell them so, and they have arranged to have an engineer here first thing tomorrow for as long as necessary to witness the fault, diagnose it, and hopefully rectify it.
No complaints from here, and no sign of an overseas call centre either.
bimsb6 said:
Why would you still have wi fi ?
The OP was just saying if the router worked and booted up, it would connect to the phone and then show no internet connection but would still connect to the phone.His Router isn't booting so it isn't even making a connection to the phone possible. pointing the issue straight at a faulty router rather than a local area issue.
I moved house recently and I've experienced the whole range of the customer service roulette.
Severn Trent top my list of really good customer service. I got through to a UK based member of staff within 2 minutes of calling at 6pm on a Tuesday night. The very polite lady dealt with my query within 5 minutes and all was resolved perfectly.
On the flip side; a well known energy supplier caused me the biggest grief. UK based staff again, but utterly useless and desperate to get me off the phone.
Big shout out to two companies that use overseas staff; Three and BT. The times I've been required to call them for help, both had shown excellent customer service and sorted my problem very quickly. BT were even doing followed up calls after the engineer had been to ensure everything was sorted. Although obviously based in warmer climates, the staff were actually quite knowledgeable about the problems and had a better grasp of English than people over here.
Just goes to show, you pay for what you get, not matter the location.
Severn Trent top my list of really good customer service. I got through to a UK based member of staff within 2 minutes of calling at 6pm on a Tuesday night. The very polite lady dealt with my query within 5 minutes and all was resolved perfectly.
On the flip side; a well known energy supplier caused me the biggest grief. UK based staff again, but utterly useless and desperate to get me off the phone.
Big shout out to two companies that use overseas staff; Three and BT. The times I've been required to call them for help, both had shown excellent customer service and sorted my problem very quickly. BT were even doing followed up calls after the engineer had been to ensure everything was sorted. Although obviously based in warmer climates, the staff were actually quite knowledgeable about the problems and had a better grasp of English than people over here.
Just goes to show, you pay for what you get, not matter the location.
Just as a quick aside, I'm not familiar with virgin routers but there will be a LAN connection available for you to plug your laptop directly into (via a CAT5 cable). There's a small chance that you will get an IP address for this and can manage the router via the routers management url.
Also, there is probably a way of performing a factory reset on the router (holding various buttons down on boot), that's probably worth a try.
Apologies if these ideas have already been mentioned.
Also, there is probably a way of performing a factory reset on the router (holding various buttons down on boot), that's probably worth a try.
Apologies if these ideas have already been mentioned.
The issue with telephone customer support is that's its role is to fix 95% of the problems, most of which are "have you tried switching it off and on again?" answers. To be fair, working from a PD script probably solves most calls.
What they are not trained or able to do is listen to a customer narrative, understand what they have already tried and jump most of the steps in the decision tree, they have to start the process from scratch which is irritating
Its probably a difficult job, 99% of calls are from people who struggle with lace up shoes, the other 1% from people who know what the problem is and just want someone to implement the solution.
What they are not trained or able to do is listen to a customer narrative, understand what they have already tried and jump most of the steps in the decision tree, they have to start the process from scratch which is irritating
Its probably a difficult job, 99% of calls are from people who struggle with lace up shoes, the other 1% from people who know what the problem is and just want someone to implement the solution.
TedMaul said:
The issue with telephone customer support is that's its role is to fix 95% of the problems, most of which are "have you tried switching it off and on again?" answers. To be fair, working from a PD script probably solves most calls.
That did actually piss me off with Virgin. Their answering robot talks for ages before you get to speak to a human. One of the things it does is to say "I'll just run some tests on your equipment." And then it says (every time) "I can see your equipment hasn't been restarted for quite some time, so do that now". Oh really? Even though it's brand new, and I only plugged it in yesterday? f
k off, Robot!bimsb6 said:
TedMaul said:
bimsb6 said:
Why would you still have wi fi ?
Do you work for Virgin too, or BT?Being able to browse via WiFi would mean I could connect to the internet - I.e more than just the router.
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