Imagine, the capital of the country you are operating in, hundreds of thousands of customers being without their TV or broadband service by a badly managed outage,  but not being published anywhere in the news. But on the website there is a ticket outlining what the progress of a several day outage of these services for the whole of South West London is… here is just that detail

Updates

Yepp, day in, day out, every 4 hours, the same poor expectation management – your services will be up and running in 4 hours, then after 4 hours the same standard “we are looking into it and will let you know” message appears… Sky Digital must be laughing their asses off at this.

I managed to find myself an alternative connection for today… down the pub :)

So far there has been no Virgin Media broadband or Cable TV in all of south west London for around 36 hours and for the first 24 of it there was almost no communication available to find out when service was to be restored.

All this makes me far more likely to switch to Sky in January when our latest contract expires (we have been with VM for 5 years now) they seem to have some good offers on at the moment and I think TV would be better with Sky – better provision for HD content etc.

Throughout yesterday there were only two updates on the Virgin Media service status page so people could find out what was going on, when I phoned the customer services number (150) all I got to do was hear “Sorry we are unusually busy right now, to avoid waiting in queues please call back later” then immediate disconnection… that was the only infuriating part of this outage – how VM have been handling their customers.

So I can see myself changing to a Sky bundle in the new year where hopefully customers are treated better when things inevitably go wrong.