It's so annoying.
You've been a good customer through your minimum term and you get the (OFCOM mandated) e-mail to say that your price is going up. Not just a little, but by a lot. We're going to help you fix this - for another 12 months at least.
Now this is a bit counter-intuitive for us, because by following these steps, you'll be staying with your existing provider and we won't be making a sale. That said, it's more important to us that you get the best advice, and if we can provide it, maybe you'll consider us in the future - or recommend a friend.
Now then. Here's the lifecycle of a virgin media customer:
At this point one of two things happens.
Virgin really wants you to stay on the existing price. Enough of you will stay to justify the number of customers who end up leaving.
Virgin has a plan B and it comes in the guise of 'customer care'.
You'll be able to speak to an inbound advisor and they'll sympathise for a bit, and then offer you something cheaper than your renewal, but still not very good. For some reason, they'll also antagonise you a bit about the fact that this price rise was in their T&C's. When we were doing our customer checks, the advisor repeated this point three times. Not a good way to convince people to stay.
What many people do at this point is gripe a bit and accept the offer that they get. DON'T DO IT!
At this point, we declined and ordered a cancellation of services in 30 days' time. The customer gave all kinds of warnings about loss of service and we ended the call.
Fast-forward 24 hours and we receive a call from 0345 454 1098 - it's Virgin's special outbound team for 'jeopardy' customers. This is when we actually got a better offer. We were offered 200Mbps broadband for just £26.00 per month. This is less than HALF of our post-contract price, and £13.00 less than we were offered when we called in.
We price-checked the faster service (350Mbps) on this call and were offered it for £31.00 per month.
If you agree to stay on this second call, you don't have to sit through any kind of recap and your next bill should reflect the new price. This will be way less than any new customer can get the same service for - even when shopping around on broadbandmoneysaver.com or any other comparison site.
We hope this has been helpful. Please drop a comment below to let us know how you got on, and just so we can keep working to help customers, please recommend our comparison service to those you love... or those you hate. We get paid either way :D
Pete has worked in the telecoms industry for 16 years - and launched this comparison service to provide a better deal to customers nationwide.
