My wife died suddenly 18 weeks ago. I contacted Virgin Media to get our phone and broadband account transferred from her name to mine. Its website said I could make changes to the package at the same time so I asked to be moved to a deal at half the cost.
I was told I would have to cancel the existing contract and wait 14 days before signing up to a new deal. This would leave me with no internet connection and unable to work from home. The other option was to transfer the existing package to my name and change it after 30 days. I chose the latter.
Thirty days later, I signed in to the app, only to be greeted by my late wife’s name which was upsetting. A webchat referred me back to the bereavement line. I had to explain once again that my wife had died. I was told I couldn’t be transferred to the cheaper package as the system hadn’t yet updated to my name. I was promised a callback in three days. It never came.
Three weeks later the webchat again referred me back to the bereavement line to repeat the whole process. Again I was told the system hadn’t updated. It’s now three months since I first contacted Virgin and I’m paying twice as much as I need to. I cannot face calling its bereavement line and having to explain once again that my wife has died.
GP, Ely
Corporate incompetence or callousness? The two amount to pretty much the same thing when you’ve been strung along for as long and painfully as you have.
Quite apart from the anguish of having repeatedly to tell strangers that your wife has died, you have been left paying £69.21 for your old, now unwanted contract, instead of £33.99 a month for the package you had requested.
Virgin called you within hours of my contact and blamed new staff for giving you wrong information. It transpires you should have been able to close the old account and start a new deal with potential service interruption of an hour, not 14 days.
A spokesperson said: “We apologise for the delay in resolving his query. We’ve now agreed a new package at a lower monthly cost.”
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