Customer service my a**e!

[Gern]

Some of you may remember the problems I had with Virgin some time ago. They increased the price of my services from £50 to almost £80. Not happy with that I spent three days trying to contact them with no success. I finally got fed up and changed to Sky.

I did manage to get hold of Virgin on day four and when I told them I was cancelling my subscription, they immediately offered all my services at the new price of £37. I still cancelled and a couple of days later got an email offering all my original services for £25!

I'm still with Sky.

So yesterday I received a notification from Paypal saying I had an invoice for £105 from some company in Ireland I'd never heard of. Naturally I was suspicious and cancelled it. The DigitalRiver Company of Ireland then contacted me to say the bill was for my AVG internet security.

I got in touch with AVG and found this was the new rate for the services I had subscribed for and if I wasn't happy, they'd provide
the same services for half price - £52.50! On the same message from their help department, they quoted the standard price for my package as £90!

I'm not with AVG any more and I'm only paying £19!

So every time a contract ends we now have to contact them to get a fair price for their services? Do yourselves a favour guys and don't accept automatic renewal of contracts!

[boatman]

WOW Dave im with sky an i thought they chargein a high subsciption an was goin to change to virgin an now ive seen your post i think i'll stay with sky wow
chrisb

[Geoffers]

Seems to be standard practice with a lot of companies now unfortunately :angry:

Geoff.

[Tim Marlow]

That is just ridiculous Dave. I must admit to buying a new antivirus package every year from Amazon. It’s always cheaper than renewal of the existing one, even if it’s the same company.

Still worth contacting Sky at renewal time Chris, they seem to add things just to keep you happy. Last time I did I got the full sports package and a new Q box upgrade for one pound extra a month.

[simontie]

Horrible thing reoccurring payments not to mention the lack of customer services in just about every field all designed to catch us out and make the big boys more money

[Gary MacKenzie]

Since you mention AVG, I assume you are a Windows user.
Why pay for AVG when there is AVG free ........ Why use AVG free when Windows comes with its own anti-virus?

[Guest]

Dave,
With Virgin I had the same problem, eventually after a debate between myself and the page turner on the other end of the phone my monthly bill was reduced to £34.
But I also explained that they were continually removing programmes but the bill kept going up - why? for example Turner Classic Movies was the latest to be removed - no answer came the swift reply.

Thank the stars I have a firestick and can download apps that give me the latest movies for free, and all the sports channels that are paid for by subscription. And with a little tutorial from youtube.

Had a recent conversation with EE who sent me a text offering me 5gb of data for the princely sum of £7 per month. But I argued I do not use data on my phone and why should I go blind trying to look at a screen the size of a slice of bread when I have my 17 inch laptop plus a 24 inch monitor connected to it - Ahhh! came the reply, but if you take the data your bill will be £7.50 per month. I tried to explain that if they took away the data then I could still pay £7 per month instead of what I pay now £7.50!!!

AVG - use the free one, you will be reminded that your pc is slowing down, your IP address is visible, you are open to cyber attack etc etc but this is all to get money out of you. And if you pay to have one thing done (19.99pm) then they find another thing to get another £19.99pm out of you. I worked it out some time ago that if you took out all of their 'services', you would be paying over £100pm. And they warn you about scammers....
Mike.

[The Smythe Meister]

I think you guys were lucky to get to talk to anyone at all!!.....
When we were with Vigin,and wanted to ring up with any type of query,all I ever got was,"we are experiencing a high level of calls, please call back later,or use the online service,(which was worse than useless btw)," or,and this was once in a blue moon,if we did get to actually speak to someone,neither of us could understand what the other was saying!!....
Needless to say,we left,now with Sky, cancelled all TV type packages,and use the fibre to stream everything/use the internet....bill went from £110 a month to £30 :thumb2:

[rickoshea52]

Ah Virgin Media. I had an account with them years ago. Their service was patchy and I often didn’t have a strong enough broadband connection just to connect. When I complained and suggested going to another provider the telephone agents exact words were “Go on then.” So I did.
When it came to trying to cancel the contract I got into a chat bot mousetrap on line where they kept offering me lower prices to stay despite the fact they couldn’t deliver what I would be paying for. I had to keep repeating the same line, “ I want to cancel my contract.”, over and over for 30 minutes before they finally got the message.

[Gern]

Whatever happened to the days when big companies wanted our business and treated us properly?

[The Smythe Meister]

That was when there were standards,morals,ethics and genuine respect for people.....
..... now it's just about making obscene amounts of profits for as little outlay as humanly possible.

[boatman]

Whatever happened to the days when big companies wanted our business and treated us properly?

Dave these big companies dont care about the customer now all they want is your cash Ba**ds

[stillp]

Why are Customer Service departments staffed by people who don't understand either of those words?
Pete

[Gern]

Since you mention AVG, I assume you are a Windows user.
Why pay for AVG when there is AVG free ........ Why use AVG free when Windows comes with its own anti-virus?

I was a user of the free AVG but I had a couple of occasions when some sort of nasty invaded my machine. I've not had any problems since using the paid version.

Are you talking about Windows Defender? The last time I tried to scan my PC using that, I gave up after nearly 3 hours!

[Gary MacKenzie]

Are you talking about Windows Defender? The last time I tried to scan my PC using that, I gave up after nearly 3 hours!

It should not take that long except on first check , it usually checks each new file when added.