Broadband Customer Experience: Twenty-eight minutes of life lost

With people relying on fast internet access for home working, one would expect the broadband providers would have upped their game in terms of customer support. New data from Ofcom covering complaints to broadband operators, has found that 31% of complaints were due to the complaints handling process.

From a recent call made to Virgin Media to disconnect Virgin Media’s broadband service, Computer Weekly believes its contact centre system is seriously flawed. It is fair enough to ask the customer to enter their account number and area code and a letter from a passphrase using their telephone’s keypad, but then to be asked again for further verification from a call centre operator, pushes one’s patience. Yes, this happens elsewhere, but it is not good CX.

On the plus side, the call to the call centre operator did go through pretty quickly. Then there is the inevitable “soft sell”, where the call centre operator looks at your account and plucks a figure from the script being read. Lo and behold, your bill is now a little bit less.
No surprises here. It’s what we’ve come to expect. You called to disconnect and no matter how hard you try, Virgin Media is going to try to keep you. They’ll say: “Let me see if I can find a better deal.”

Finally, and it is hard to determine if this is actually part of the script Virgin Media provides for its call centre staff, or the system simply is not set up to fulfil customer disconnection requests, the call handler passes you over to someone else.