Worst Customer Service Experience Ever

[cliveb]

<rant>
This morning I spent over an hour talking to a lady at Virgin Support. Despite the fact that I had gathered the appropriate evidence of what the problem might be in Virgin's network following some updates they made at midnight, and had already done all the obvious stuff, she insisted on going through a script and asking me to do things that I knew wouldn't work.

The cable modem successfully connected and got IP address/subnet mask/gateway/DNS servers from the Virgin DHCP server. But the gateway was not reachable. This much was obvious to me within about 30 seconds. But this lady had me doing all sorts of crazy things, including:
- deleting all my cookies and internet temporary files
- restarting the PC in safe mode without networking(!)
- restarting in safe mode with networking :-)
- rebooting the cable modem with the COAX cable disconnected (!!!)
- manually setting the IP properties to the same as already set up by DHCP

Of course none of this worked. I politely asked to speak to a supervisor. None was available. I then asked for the number of a technical support engineer so I could talk to someone who understood what I was saying. She replied that she was a technical support engineer. My response was that perhaps she ought to know a little more about networking in that case.

The only plus points from the experience were:
- I have a Virgin landline, so at least the call was free (via 150).
- I got through very quickly - much less then a minute.

The service finally came back about midday. Presumably some real engineers had noticed the problem and sorted it.
</rant>

OK, now I've got that off my chest, a question:

Does anyone know of a number I can call that will get me through to someone who actually understands networking and won't just go through a set script?

[Pia]

Does anyone know of a number I can call that will get me through to someone who actually understands networking and won't just go through a set script?

Well i would hazard a guess that they can't just take your word for it that you're savvy on the equipment and have already tested it, so would need to run the basic troubleshooting stuff beforehand. Although i do agree it's annoying.

I was told once that Limewire was the reason for my slow speed. I said Limewire isn't running, in fact i'm pretty sure i uninstalled it. He said well you had Limewire once in the past that's why your speed is 1kbps instead of 4mb :D

[xspeedyx]

I have heard this before LOL

[Stuart]

<rant>
This morning I spent over an hour talking to a lady at Virgin Support. Despite the fact that I had gathered the appropriate evidence of what the problem might be in Virgin's network following some updates they made at midnight, and had already done all the obvious stuff, she insisted on going through a script and asking me to do things that I knew wouldn't work.

The cable modem successfully connected and got IP address/subnet mask/gateway/DNS servers from the Virgin DHCP server. But the gateway was not reachable. This much was obvious to me within about 30 seconds. But this lady had me doing all sorts of crazy things, including:
- deleting all my cookies and internet temporary files
- restarting the PC in safe mode without networking(!)
- restarting in safe mode with networking :-)
- rebooting the cable modem with the COAX cable disconnected (!!!)
- manually setting the IP properties to the same as already set up by DHCP

Of course none of this worked. I politely asked to speak to a supervisor. None was available. I then asked for the number of a technical support engineer so I could talk to someone who understood what I was saying. She replied that she was a technical support engineer. My response was that perhaps she ought to know a little more about networking in that case.

The only plus points from the experience were:
- I have a Virgin landline, so at least the call was free (via 150).
- I got through very quickly - much less then a minute.

The service finally came back about midday. Presumably some real engineers had noticed the problem and sorted it.
</rant>

OK, now I've got that off my chest, a question:

Does anyone know of a number I can call that will get me through to someone who actually understands networking and won't just go through a set script?

Having spoken to tech support people in various companies (and being friends with a few), the reason that they go through all the basic stuff is that regardless of what they say, 90% of people have little or no idea of how computers actually work. Even those that do may have knowledge of one specific area, and little knowledge of how the networking side of things works.

The problem is that the Tech Support agent doesn't know how much knowledge you actually have, so they have to assume that you know little or nothing because 90% of the people they speak to will know little or nothing.

Now, it sounds like there was a network fault, but I know for a fact that NTL (and I assume Virgin) did not recognise that there was a fault in the network until at lease 3 or 4 people reported the same problem.

Also, it's entirely possible that they were already aware of the fault and working on it. In VM, sadly, the customer service people are the last to know about things like that.

As for direct numbers to the second line support people, VM don't publish those. You have to go through the main 151 service and get redirected.

---------- Post added at 19:17 ---------- Previous post was at 19:13 ----------

Having said that, VM tech support isn't perfect. When it was NTL, and I had broadband through my STB, they swore blind that the reson that I couldn't get the full 10 meg of my service was that my Laptop couldn't handle it.

This is despite the fact that my Laptop also used to connect through the network at work and could handle speeds well in excess of 10 Meg without showing strain.

They then admitted that they had found the STB's weren't reliable above 7 meg, so they capped them at 5..

[D.Casey]

From my own experiences with my on-going problem I've had to be in regular contact with Customer Service/Tech support for months now.
I found that if your lucky enough to speak to somebody in the UK your more than likelly to feel satisfied with how your being dealt with as in my experiences the UK based support is very good & will always listen to you.

As for the india based call centres... 99% of the time it feels like talking to a brick wall, most the time its even hard to understand them (alotta the time this is because of the music they have on in the background lol).
It feels like they are reading from a script, and the worst part of dealing with them is they very often don't even bother recording test/line results for the techs to refer to (when they come out).

I would gladly pay alot more for my service if VM got rid of these indian based call centre's for the Broadband part.

[cliveb]

As for the india based call centres... 99% of the time it feels like talking to a brick wall, most the time its even hard to understand them (alotta the time this is because of the music they have on in the background lol).
It feels like they are reading from a script, and the worst part of dealing with them is they very often don't even bother recording test/line results for the techs to refer to (when they come out).
I decided not to mention that I was talking to a lady in India as it seemed irrelevant. She was polite and I had no trouble understanding her. She even remained polite when I told her that she didn't know enough about networking to be doing the job. What irritated me was nothing to do with her location or race, but her refusal to listen. I tried to tell her exactly what was wrong:

"I can see from my logs that just after midnight the network in my area was re-arranged. I got this new IP address: <81.108.78.116> and this new default gateway: <81.108.76.1>. But that gateway can't be reached from that IP address. Either the gateway is down or you have a routing problem".

She ignored that and just launched straight into the standard script and had me doing all sorts of daft things which I knew would make no difference. Had she just thanked me for the fault report and passed it on to the field engineers it would have taken about 2 minutes. But instead she wasted an hour of my time, *and an hour of hers*. Time is money. Virgin shouldn't be wasting it like this.