'Lifetime' Loyalty bundle

[lexx]

Apologies if this has been asked before, but I'm new to the site.
I am with Virgin media for tv broadband and phone (& separate account for mobile phone). After recently checking my bills in more detail, I noticed they had increased my monthly advance charge without telling me. I got in touch with them and they said they can do so and it is in the terms & conditions that your package may be subject to increase and theres nothing I can do about it.
I was obviously very unhappy as in Nov 2008 I was put on a lifetime loyalty bundle by the retentions dept and was told the price would not increase as long as I remained a VM customer and stayed on the same package. This call was recorded and I took a note of the ops name. So I wrote a letter to them and gave all the details. A girl in customer services called me today saying they cant access old recorded calls as they are only used for training purposes and in a nutshell, its just too bad they can increase regardless of a lifetime loyalty bundle which by their definition is not actually lifetime.
Any suggestions as I feel that they have totally let me down and refuse to budge and intend to close my complaint despite my feeling they have not dealt with it at all. They wont even let me speak to a manager, retentions dept, complaints or anyone other than "customer service".
To make matters worse they also told me the price would increase again in April!! thats £4 added on per month last year and £4-£5 per month this year too.
whatever happened to trying to keep your loyal customers happy? they dont seem the least bit interested despite my being a NTL then VM customer for over 10 years.

[BenMcr]

There is no such thing as a lifetime loyalty bundle.

There are bundles which are at a certain price, but just like any other price they may be changed as per the T&Cs

All customers are sent letters before a price change under the T&Cs.

[nomadking]

Is it that there was a discount of £x and once the contract expired, a price increase of £y was applied, which others had already been charged.

[lexx]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

There is no such thing as a lifetime loyalty bundle.

There are bundles which are at a certain price, but just like any other price they may be changed as per the T&Cs

All customers are sent letters before a price change under the T&Cs.

So it seems.
But to the uninitiated layperson like myself, if you are told by a VM staff member, who should clearly know more about their packages than I do, if they offer a lifetime loyalty bundle, why would you expect anything other than that, especially when they clarify that it will remain so for the duration of my being a customer?
It seems quite underhanded to me! Obviously if their t&c say they can change the price whenever, whats the point of offering it in the first place! If this was a credit card or loan agreement, I am sure they have to use plain english and be clear about what they are offering. Lifetime to me means lifetime, what else could you possibly think they mean by using that term?
If they said limited term or reduced price for a set period of time, I would not feel they had misled me. This is why I am so annoyed. That and the fact they absolutely refuse to let me speak to anyone who can actually converse with me without repeating the same scripted sentences repeatedly.

And as for being sent a letter before hand, as my reduced 'loyalty' price had only been in operation for 5 months, and I did not receive any mail to the contrary, it was increased anyway and obviously now I am querying it,they said they contacted me by post (apparently), but if they had done this at the time I would have contacted them and not spent so long phoning and writing letters etc looking for an explanation.

---------- Post added at 21:37 ---------- Previous post was at 21:33 ----------

Originally Posted by nomadking

Is it that there was a discount of £x and once the contract expired, a price increase of £y was applied, which others had already been charged.

Not to my knowledge, they increased it 5 months after offering the reduced price in the first place. I would presume a contract would be for maybe 12 months or so, so I dont think anything had expired.

[RobboEdin]

Perhaps the best thing for the OP to do is to post here the before and after bills so that someone can explain what has happened.

I suspect this is a case where the OP was getting multiple discounts that he should not have been getting and some data cleansing exercise has quite rightly corrected the mis-billing.

Of course, only by posting the before and after bills can my supposition be (dis-)proved.

Armed with help from here, you can then make a rational complaint.

[dcclanuk]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

There is no such thing as a lifetime loyalty bundle.

There are bundles which are at a certain price, but just like any other price they may be changed as per the T&Cs

All customers are sent letters before a price change under the T&Cs.

Ben, I don't know if there is or there isn't any LIFETIME bundles, but I am also on one of these bundles. and at the time of getting it, I was also told it was "LIFETIME".

If customer's are lied to, then you really cannot blame the customer for thinking they have a LIFETIME deal when they haven't and no such thing exists.

My bills went up a bit too sometime last year, but I didn't bother complaining as I think it is still an OK deal, and reading CF, you know that CS/Retentions do lie and I didn't think it was worth the effort to argue and basically get nowhere as the OP has so far found it to be...

[bonzoe]

I often wonder what a lifetime guarantee is. Buy a piece of kit with a lifetime guarantee, kit fails, try to take up guarantee and told that kit has reached end of life......

[Peter_]

If it ain't got LIfetime offer in the notes then it is nothing more than a deal on your package, end of story.

[Matth]

I doubt anyone would have got a PRICE fixed for life, even the value of lifetime discounts have been eroded, as well as the price tracking any increase in the base prices.

[squealy]

I'm on one of these "lifetime" deals that VM offered to many reprobates who phoned retentions to complain about the loss of the Sky Basics pack, which has now thankfully been restored. I don't think they ever said to me that the price would remain the same, just that as long as I didn't change my bundle that I'd always be charged whatever it cost on a "lifetime" discount.

[alferret]

Ah reprobate, what a wonderful & sometimes colourful word.

We was offered a lifetime loyalty bundle on our package back in mid to late 06 when we were going to leave VM's phone and go with Vonage.
We were offered TU, TM, TI + line rental + 10mb BB for £26.95 a month for as long as we didnt drop either service that rebate would stay in place. nearly 4 years down the line we still have the same discount running but our overall cost's have crept up slightly as VM have increased their line rental but the discount still shows on the bill as "loyalty rebate"

[hedgie]

When I upgraded to V+ I was also offered a loyalty discount, and on the condition that I did not downgrade my service the discount would apply so long as I was a VM customer. I have been with Nynex, Cable& Wireless, NTL and VM continuously for years.

I think there are two issues;

1 - customers are being promised things by staff, who may well be on a commission, when they do not have the authority to do so. I know I was told my discount would be "lifetime"

2 - the pricing (and previous discount) structure was so complex that staff and customers became, and some still are, confused.

In my case the price HAS gone up, BUT my discount has still been the same the same. I suspect that the confusion comes form a combination of selective truth telling on the part of sales staff and selective hearing on the part of customers. For my part I am still happy with the total price I pay each month for the service I get

The simple, although probably difficult to implement, solution would be for VM to record all sales conversations and then log them against the customers account.

Not sure this helps move things forward much but I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that rightly or wrongly VM staff are promising customers lifetime deals. It is then understandable for customers to become frustrated and angry when a different face in VM effectively pulls the rug from under you.

Anyone from VM care to comment on staff training and incentives when offering "retention" type incentives ??

[Tygstead]

Just checked my Feb bill. My loyalty discount has gone from -£19.46 to -£18.46 (so £1 more per month). No email notification. No letter. Is this happening to quite a few people?

[Tygstead]

Retracting my past comment: turns out there was a "billing error". Virgin have just issued a replacement bill at the correct discount.

[MrB]

Originally Posted by hedgie

Not sure this helps move things forward much but I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that rightly or wrongly VM staff are promising customers lifetime deals. It is then understandable for customers to become frustrated and angry when a different face in VM effectively pulls the rug from under you.

VM went through a period, particularly when they lost the Sky channels, of offering Loyalty Discounts to keep customers - many customers were told at the time that these were "Lifetime". A number of the regulars on here have offered the reasoning in the past that sales staff were not authorised to offer these, hence they were removed, but there is considerable evidence when you look at various discussion boards that it wasn't isolated and therefore clearly wasn't applied by "rogue agents" but it was a policy that teams were following. The policy changed, and instead of coming clean and admitting that and moving on, the claim was made that many of us loyal customers were mistaken.

MrB