Quality of support

[douglet]

As you may well know a few things have changed with Virgin Media/Blueyonder technical support.

As Virgin Media is heavily in debt due mostly to NTL, some things have changed in the way you recieve your support.

You now call an 0906 number charged at 25p/min plus 10p to connect, now the first problem with this is that you rarely get thorught to the right department IE if your Ex NTL you normally get through to Ex Telewest and vice versa for Ex Telewest customer, this is partly due to there call routing system and how poor it is.

After all this you will be lucky to get through to some who speaks English as their first language, the problem with this is that I used to work for Virgin Media (BY Tech Support) and I couldnt understand what the hell they were on about. So im not especting anyone else to.

the India call centre's in Puni and Delhi are being constantly monitored by agents from UK call centre's Mainly Liverpool, and they all know how bad they are and so do Virgin media, but they dont care about the customers its all about how much it costs to man the phone.

Agents in India get paid per call they take so its in their own interests to answer as many calls as possible, as MORE CALLS TAKEN = MORE MONEY, its all basic maths. Thats why your either rushed off the phone given poor technical support or even hung up on.

in UK call centres agents have whats call and AHT (average handling time) last I heard it was 610 seconds not that long when you think about it.

The main point of writing this thread is I was lucky I got out, but for those who stayed their bonus this quarter was the sack about 40 of them, this is in the call centre in Liverpool, an Ex Telewest centre.

Now this is where it all gets a bit misty as all of the above was to my knowledge very true. but now is a little cloudly due to the fact ive heard the story from many existing members of the tech support team at Liverpool.

Virgin Media is all Outsourced a little like this - Virgin media - IBM -Adecco Managed Services. One long line of absoloute incompitance.

Virgin are so heavily in debt that sacking its best technical support agents who earn around 13-16K Per anum is the only solution to get them out of the red, as if!! they are slowly but surely sourcing all its technical support to India, well they have been preparing them for the past 3 years or so.

They may keep a small skeleton staff in the UK but only so they can Advertise the fact they have UK call centres, but do you think they will pass the saving on to customers, an even bigger LOL it will all line the pockets of Virgin Media shareholders, like Mr Branson.

also whats happening is that the people who support you television and fixed line telephony will also be trained to support Blueyonder as they are only on 12K Per anum, these are the blonde bimbo type of scousers who can smile and say thank you and sorry but who dont know the difference between a file and a folder, ask them what SNR means and and they will probably tell you its a new alcopop or something.

This is the future of you tech support. Now don't get me wrong I love my cable modem but I don't need to call them for support, I don't think id love it as much if some bimbo was trying to explain to me about a High TX or RX load.

Now a few words of advice if ure told ure due a credit for the cost of the call to tech support as it was a virgin fault them make sure you account is credited, its down to the agent to do it and most of the time Indian agents don't know their **** form their elbow ****check ure bill****

[weesteev]

Originally Posted by douglet

As you may well know a few things have changed with Virgin Media/Blueyonder technical support.

As Virgin Media is heavily in debt due mostly to NTL, some things have changed in the way you recieve your support.

You now call an 0906 number charged at 25p/min plus 10p to connect, now the first problem with this is that you rarely get thorught to the right department IE if your Ex NTL you normally get through to Ex Telewest and vice versa for Ex Telewest customer, this is partly due to there call routing system and how poor it is.

After all this you will be lucky to get through to some who speaks English as their first language, the problem with this is that I used to work for Virgin Media (BY Tech Support) and I couldnt understand what the hell they were on about. So im not especting anyone else to.

the India call centre's in Puni and Delhi are being constantly monitored by agents from UK call centre's Mainly Liverpool, and they all know how bad they are and so do Virgin media, but they dont care about the customers its all about how much it costs to man the phone.

Agents in India get paid per call they take so its in their own interests to answer as many calls as possible, as MORE CALLS TAKEN = MORE MONEY, its all basic maths. Thats why your either rushed off the phone given poor technical support or even hung up on.

in UK call centres agents have whats call and AHT (average handling time) last I heard it was 610 seconds not that long when you think about it.

The main point of writing this thread is I was lucky I got out, but for those who stayed their bonus this quarter was the sack about 40 of them, this is in the call centre in Liverpool, an Ex Telewest centre.

Now this is where it all gets a bit misty as all of the above was to my knowledge very true. but now is a little cloudly due to the fact ive heard the story from many existing members of the tech support team at Liverpool.

Virgin Media is all Outsourced a little like this - Virgin media - IBM -Adecco Managed Services. One long line of absoloute incompitance.

Virgin are so heavily in debt that sacking its best technical support agents who earn around 13-16K Per anum is the only solution to get them out of the red, as if!! they are slowly but surely sourcing all its technical support to India, well they have been preparing them for the past 3 years or so.

They may keep a small skeleton staff in the UK but only so they can Advertise the fact they have UK call centres, but do you think they will pass the saving on to customers, an even bigger LOL it will all line the pockets of Virgin Media shareholders, like Mr Branson.

also whats happening is that the people who support you television and fixed line telephony will also be trained to support Blueyonder as they are only on 12K Per anum, these are the blonde bimbo type of scousers who can smile and say thank you and sorry but who dont know the difference between a file and a folder, ask them what SNR means and and they will probably tell you its a new alcopop or something.

This is the future of you tech support. Now don't get me wrong I love my cable modem but I don't need to call them for support, I don't think id love it as much if some bimbo was trying to explain to me about a High TX or RX load.

Now a few words of advice if ure told ure due a credit for the cost of the call to tech support as it was a virgin fault them make sure you account is credited, its down to the agent to do it and most of the time Indian agents don't know their **** form their elbow ****check ure bill****

Well that was completely misadvised nonsense from an unhappy ex staffer. Well worth taking with a pinch of salt and certainly not true. I can understand if you are unhappy but theres no need to speculate about a situation you dont know enough about (like pay for outsourced agents).

Those "blonde bimbos" in Liverpool are at risk of redundancy as all telephony support is being switched to Nottingham. These "bimbos" were actually highly trained members of staff who knew the telephony switches inside out, it will be a sad day to see them go! Please dont pass comment when you werent in a position to work with these guys on a daily basis!

Virgin is not so much in debt that it has to sack staff, it is streamlining the business as there are a lot of duplicate positions. You would notice the company is actually in a positive cash flow situation after the recent financial results.

The problems with the internal IVR system are being caused mainly due to the multiple billing systems, the last system is due to change over by the end of October which should make a big difference with call routing as well.

If a customer disputes a charge to tech support then speak to customer care to discuss the issue.

The premium rate charge is in place to deter non BBI fault calls, calls are refunded if a tech is required or the modem needs to be swapped (or there is a known fault in the region).

Outsourced agents work for IBM in India are paid a salary, not per call.

I can completely defend our outsourced partners as there is clearly a language barrier but the learning and development team are working with them to support the customers. It has been clearly stated before that "if it doesnt work we are pulling out". Its not all doom and gloom!

[douglet]

ROFL mao what a you have been brainwashed by the IBM train of thought, I actually tained and worked on Telephony before doing BY tech support so yes i did work with these people on a day to day basis, Learning and development know about as much as Richard Branson, and no im not bitter i just think that VM is poorly run partly due to the fact that people like youself love the company.

Oh and yes the diferent systems, ICOMS is a good system Harmonising it all is a good move but call routing problems should have bene foreseen.

im certainly not disgruntled i loved wokring for VM the staff are excellent its just a shame the management are a gang of jumped up bleepers. thank you

---------- Post added at 12:06 ---------- Previous post was at 12:05 ----------

oh and you can contatc customer care for a reufnd if you can get throug to them

[darthlinux]

I work in customer care and yes at certain times it is hard to get thorught but that from about 5 - 8 as that is the time when most people get home from work and wanna pay their bill or query or any other kind of bill and general call. I really dont see why if BY support will not refund a call customer care will as the agent you speak to was not part of the call you had.

At the end of the day each department have a job and it is customer care normally that pick up the ****.

I know you say you loved the job so much but why be so bitter about this like you said you dont need to speak to them for support andthere are only a few outsourced reps that I spoke to that really dont know what they are doing remeber they are reading what to say and it makes a big difference if a customer does whatr they tell them, I would klike the support to be uk based but thats not happening yet as our learning and development team I due to go out tthere for 10 weeks to train them to a high level it cost around £20000 to send one trainer no need to spend that much if vm dont think we can make it better for a customer

[douglet]

Customer care at VM do an excellent job, generally every cust care rep ive had dealings with are helpfull and know alot about their job.

I have had the displeasure of remotely listening into Indian agents for many months and know first hand the lies and poor service they give. Yes some are excellent but the majority are very poor.

I also know people from the BY learning and development team and know what they think of the Indian agents no names mentioned but they also believe that wasting more time ans effort ont training them is pointless.

[NTLVictim]

Originally Posted by darthlinux

I work in customer care and yes at certain times it is hard to get thorught but that from about 5 - 8 as that is the time when most people get home from work and wanna pay their bill or query or any other kind of bill and general call.

We were told by one ..person that a manager wasn't available because "it was gone six". We started what should have been a simple call before five...

Fortunately a very very nice man from cs exec called me back and sorted it via the good graces of this forum.

The people DarthanythingbutSco referred to were out earning money to give to VM...so, why isn't that the time zone that most CS bums are on seats?

Or am I a rocket scientist?

[darthlinux]

ask vm but I just added my knowledge

[Sirius]

I feel by reading information in the papers and by watching the News and reading well informed forums like this one, That the level of support i will receive as a customer is and will go down the tube or down the India route. Such a shame that a lot of well trained knowledgeable UK based staff are losing there jobs and being replaced by script readers offshore.

VM IMHO don't give a hoot about customers only about profits for the shareholders

[Knelf]

OK I've read the stuff here and can honestly say it fits. I've been having trouble with drop outs for months. ie you can sit there pinging their dns servers (about 4 hops) and that will suddenly stop for 2 - 8 timeouts (windows ping) as will internet radio as will the website you are loading as will anything else on another computer on the house network. At the same time you can ping the house server no problems. This is entirely intermittent and random. Some days are ok, some are hell! I wish I still had dial up, it was slow but at least it was reliably slow.

Anyhow a few months back I tried to explain this to a virgin support welsh thicky who asked me if we had wireless. I know wireless has its issues but got the impression I wouldn't be able to convince her that it wasn't the problem so lied and said no we have wires (which we do, only the laptops are on wireless) she didn't understand this and asked how we connected more than one computer if we didn't have wireless. O_o Anyhow the conversation degraded from there. She didn't understand what a server with a wired network was and in the end lied and told me she couldn't send an engineer cause there was a problem in my area. She gave me a number to call which is a recording of the website info and said nothing of the sort.

So several months have gone by and I've cracked and just called again. Couldn't get though (line drops on dial) on an o2 mobile so had to use our ("disconnected" several months ago) land line as the net was too ropey for skype to work. Got an indian guy. I wasn't gonna fall into the traps this time so went straight in telling him the problem was months old and about the ping problem etc and lied about having a wireless part on the network. To his credit he seemed to follow all this. He ran some kinda ping of my ip and said he had 60% packet loss. Then he told me to disconnect the line and said it worked fine then so said it was the computer. I said I had the same thing when I had tried it with my laptop ealier directly connected to the modem and had the same problem so it was a low probability it was the computer. He said he "didn't deal in probabilities he dealt in facts" (getting a trifle arsey) then started harping on about how long the call was taking and costing. I said I didn't mind and asked if we could run the test again with the laptop (rather than the openBSD server) connected. We did and he said he got 100% again and I too found no problems. Then the connection started dropping again so I told him to run the test again but he wouldn't and said it was clearly the computer. I asked him what exactly he thought would call this and he said I should get it looked at and certified ok. Or format the disk and reinstall. I asked what he thought the probablity of 2 computers running different operating systems both being broken even though they worked fine on other networks were and he just started going on about how long the call was taking and saying he could no longer help. He also kept harping about not being able to do anything that wasn't on "the procedure"*...

To his credit he told me the cable modem (a teryon terajet 210) was very old and I could ask to get it replaced. This will happen on thursday apparently so will see what happens then and I'll report back.

Seriously love the whole virgin deal since its cheap but the support is daylight robbery and total kak!

Knelf

Does anyone know "the procedure" ? My guess is the following:

1. Ask if customer has wireless - if so, blame that and hang up
2. Ask if customer has broadband medic - tell em to get it and hang up
3. Ask if customer has rebooted the machine - tell em to do it and try and hang up
4. ping the IP and ask customer if the light is on - if all ok hang up wether problem solved or not
5. dream up the existance of some kinda virus that stops the customer being able to ping your dns servers, blame that and hang up.

Seriously does any ex employee know what it really is?

[douglet]

from employee experience the virgin media procedure goes something like this :-

Indian agents read from a script so no matter what the issue is they will 99.9% of the time ask you to reboot your pc! then the usual thing is to try and find fault on the customers side i.e- virus's/spyware then blame that.

check for issues on the network, although if nothing has flagged up already most agents don't have the sense or training to investigate further and use appropriate tools to identify a fault, at that point they usually lie and tell you there is an outage or blame spyware.

Technical support agents are encouraged to refer customers to 'PC HELP' run by a company called Becogent at £1 / min as VM/IBM have a referal rate, there are actually posters encouraging this posted round the Liverpool call centre, so alot of people use this as a get out clause.

Basically if VM believe it not to be a fault on their network then its the CUSTOMERS fault. [END IF]

Nut while we all sit back and blast VM as I am now, we have to take a step back and look at who manages VM technical support, IBM who are incapable of managing people effectively so then outsource to Adecco Managed Services. This line of command creates confusion and al impacts on the customer. Generally its the technical support managers employed by IBM who bugger things up all trying to climb the ladder and make themselves look good at the cost of peoples jobs. These are the people who will be out the door within 18 months and on to ruin the reputation of another unsuspecting company.

[Knelf]

wow! I didn't actually expect to have got it so right! That really really is awful.

Well I'm hoping a new modem might fix things but if not we were thinking of shopping around as the TV isn't that great anyhow and thats the only reason to stick with VM, that and the cheapness. Are there any internet services that don't require paying for a BT phone line?

[GSX1402]

well although a newby on ere I have been with vm for over 6 years (telewest prior).
never really had problems with service apart from tv until 20mb came out then bb went to pot.
lucky to get 1.5mb not alone anything else.
phoned Techies 4 times on sunday each time was hard work, now i am not racist at all but as I am hard of hearing I could not understand any of them (all india staff) I knew it was not my machine and checked modem (I am a local computer retailer/repair centre)
yet treated like an idiot that knew diddly squat by somebody that was reading from txt book.
After 2 hours of calls and waiting for return calls finally got told there is maintenance work in my area so I asked why they couldn't tell me this in the beginning and they couldn't answer that. To say the lease i was livid so phoned customer relations which I gather was Scotland by the fact person I spoke to was Scottish and she was excellent and understanding. In fact she reimbursed call fee`s lowered my account payment and told me if it persists to notify her and she will arrange compensation for inconvenience of loss of service.
India centre seems total killer to VM

[douglet]

Why not call blueyonder 2nd line, these are the people who support the 1st line techies you speak to and they are based in Liverpool so are all Ex 1st line Liverpool techies well for Ex Telewest customer anyway, just goes to show that the Liverpool 1st liners go on to support India and everyone else so why sack 40 or so of em. Goes to show that IBM/VM don't give a damn about the quality of support customer get.

[Admin edit (Chris T)]: Telephone number removed at request of VM 2nd line support. DIRECT NUMBER FOR 2ND LINE SUPPORT...... when the call tree asks you select the option ATLANTIC PAVILLION. That the Liverpool call centre or atleast will be untill IBM 'RIGHT SIZE' it some more.

---------- Post added at 08:41 ---------- Previous post was at 08:30 ----------

As for changing service provider, your always going to need a BT if your not with cable and i personally don't like ADSL but VM are going really bad. I think as a Telewest customer we were spoilt with the excellent service, but remember VM is only NTL branded red and fluffy and if you read these forums alot of the rubbish is about how bad NTL were.

NTL were awful and when NTL bought Telewest the whole sodid affair became one big NTL cable mess. Well all the network/Cisco/Engineer type people all from NTL.

OH and the network couldn't handle 10meg never mind 20meg and certainly not 50 meg. take it from someone who dealt with customers everyday getting slow speeds on 10 meg because of high TX/RX loads. customers on 2/4 meg were getting better speeds than thos on 10 meg.

The direct number for 2nd line support has been removed at the request of the support desk manager. The 2nd line support team is not customer facing and will refuse to deal with direct requests from customers. Dialling the number results in longer call queues for everyone else and will not help you resolve your problem any quicker.

[Knelf]

Man I'm glad I found this forum! Loads of interesting info and it doesn't half help not to feel alone in fustrations with VM tech support.

I can well understand your problem hearing GSX. I have perfectly good hearing and managed but the guy was fairly high pitched and fast so even I had to concentrate hard. My dad is now hard of hearing and I know he wouldn't have stood a chance as its the high sounds he struggles with.

What is the number for customer relations? Have to say the woman I spoke to about ordering a new modem was excelent. Very nice and helpfull. That was the 150 number. She also gave me an address to write to since I asked if there somewhere I could send a general complaint letter to.

The address is:

Virgin Media Customer Concern
PO Box 50
Wythenshawe
Manchester
M22 0BA

if anyone is interested.

Incidentally we were on NTL and in the past have never had a problem. I know from friends they were notoriously bad for getting bills wrong and stuff but the network? Solid as a rock imo. The only problem we ever had was when we took advantage of the "try 4mb for a month for free offer" back in January. When we cancelled it in the final week they didn't put it back and charged us the 4mb fee. I called them and before I even had chance to tell them how shocking it was that they'd offer a free trial and then not honour a reversion they said they'd put it back and wouldn't charge me. So we got one month of access for free, no questions asked. Can't say fairer than that really

The trouble has only really kicked in for us since Virgin did the rebrand also, since they de-NTL'd our digi box (changed the nice easy to use blue menus to incomprehensible black and red ones) its forever having trouble accessing the VOD stuff. Trying to select a program is normally about 5 rounds of "select -> cancel. Select -> cancel" and so forth.

Well all the network/Cisco/Engineer type people all from NTL

Sorry what does that mean? (the sentence looks a little wrong) Arn't Cisco Engineers the "good guys" who know their ****? I currently have a BSC 2.1 in Computer Science but was thinking doing a Cisco Qualification might be a usefull addition to my skills since I'm already pretty competent with networking and "kinda" (obviously its fustrating at times) enjoy it.

Don't know anything though about life past the end of an ethernet cable alas (ie how cable modems and high TX/RX loads work) which is why talking to the indians is a little difficult cause annoyingly they have one up on me there.

Hmm... I guess maybe I should do a little reading before thursday and find out. I suspect who ever comes to fit the new modem will have a Masters Degree in "Pushing Plugs and Screwing Things In" but just in case I don't get a total muppet, might be an idea to know.

[douglet]

high T(Transmit) Load

high R(Recieve) Load

upstream and downstream on UBR (Universal Broadband Router)

SNR (signal to noise Ratio)

DBMV (decibells per milli volt)

Generally VM faults are with the UBR's as they can not cope with the load being put on them, hence the hight TX and RX loads. and alot of the long standing outages are Low SNR on the UBR normally when SNR drops below 21 dbmv.

so the higher the speed of your internet ie 20 meg / 50 meg the greater the load on the UBR, hence the increase in hight tx and rx loads since upgrading customers speeds.

Yes CISCO etc etc is good and they do know what they are on about, but the Telewest network managed by Telewest engineers was far superior to NTL's. thats the point i was trying to make :-)

just as a last not, alot of the 1st line techies in Liverpool educated themselves to CCNA (Cisco certified Network Associate level) and had an excellent knowledge, so IBM wer gettin CISCO certified engineers for a mere 14k a year, LOL and now they have sacked most of them. and you get some high pitched underpaid offshore person who has a degreee in hanging up the phone.