[Stuart C]

Originally Posted by Dunderhead

received an undated (and without a return correspondence address) letter from Trevor Elliott (MD, Customer Service, VirginMedia) advising me that they have been making some improvements to the way they look after my monthly bill and had noticed that they haven't been charging me enough so they are going to increase my charges by an unspecified amount.

So far, so boring. But a number of more interesting points arose when I spent half an hour talking to their Customer Services department:

1) Virgin are consolidating the former NTL billing systems, from two (broadband, telephone) into a single system

True. Although they are actually merging billing systems because they have different systems for different networks (ex-Cable and Wireless and ex-NTL).

2) to support this, a data cleansing exercise has highlighted cases such as mine where an agreed bundle of services is supplied by NTL/ Virgin at a competitive discount - discounts which VM are no longer willing to honour

True. They are also cancelling a lot of discounts to save money.

3) Virgin don't accept that they are breaking a contract with customers and are claiming the previous NTL discounts were merely an offer, not a contract

If it were a contract, they would insist on you staying at least 12 months extra, which they didn't.

4) if the offer had been in writing, then they would honour it.

This is correct. Although I didn't do a law degree, I did study some contracts law as part of my degree. Basically, a Verbal contract is worthless as if it comes to court, no one can prove what was agreed. The same applies to offers. If a Customer Service agent promises you something, then doesn't make a note on your account and you have nothing in writing, then Virgin only have your word that the offer was made. As they don't know you from Adam, they won't usually take your word (I am not saying you would, but you could be phoning up and trying to get a discount you weren't promised).

5) although there was no time limit on the offer, it could not be considered by their customers to be open-ended

Unfortunately, the above applies. They don't know what offers were made.

6) the VM rep advised me that NTL staff were in the habit of offering silly discounts, just to retain customers (even though the discounts were simply to match market rates)

Unforetunately, NTL were desperate to retain as many customers as possible. As such, they seemed to encourage retentions to keep customers at all costs. This has led less scrupulous agents to basically make up deals, just to keep the figures up.

Note: I don't know if they did encourage it, but they certainly didn't seem that active in discouraging it either.