[Chrysalis]

I will be leaving VM, its been quite a chaotic last month for me.

I did a CityFibre order back in February, but to keep a long story short it was looking odds on to not get a installation due to my property being a MDU.

I had a look at the terms Virgin Media wanted me to renew at, I am a solus customer for the most part, have no history of paying for PPV or other extras, so I suspect from their perspective they know the only potential for extra revenue from me is upsell or to jack up my price for internet.

The my deals section on the my virgin media page has no offers me, and never has done whenever I checked. They did however send me some email retention offers, most of the time the links didnt even work, but one was working at the start of this month.

So some numbers.

My deal I have had for 18 months and happy with is £29 month to VM, and (originally) £12 a month to O2, so basically a 500M broadband boosted to gig1 with volt, they also bundled in a stream box which I never even plugged in (their telemetry might show this), and a weekend calls package which I have never used.

A annual price increase would have bumped this package to £36 (their website shows this). However by coincidence my 18 month deals ends on the April billing month of this year. So I wont have a £36 bill.
The May bill if I dont recontract will be a whopping £87. £87 for 500m, and weekend calls basically. O2 if I were to keep it will be £16 a month from May.
Now this email retention offer, I clicked it and I had an upsell offer, £55 a month with some wifi kit thrown in. I clicked not interested, and it changed to a as you are offer of £45. I clicked not interested again and it changed to a final offer of £41. This aggravated me, should show me £41 first time, its like you trying to squeeze me as if I am a lemon. That didnt help my mindset and I didnt click sign me up for the renewal.
With the £16 to O2 from May onwards this would have taken net cost from £41 to £57 a month.

I mistakenly assumed surely if I rang retentions the worst case is the £41 deal, I thought logically since ringing up is higher effort, then the email offer is like a early negotiation and the agents would do better, even if they didnt I could just activate the email deal afterwards. Wrong!!

I rang retentions and explained I was considering leaving with the primary reason being the new proposed cost for renewal. I also explained CF is available in my area.

Initial offer was an upsell, in reality this was the only offer. There seemed to be no flexibility. The offer was 100 TV channels (likely freesat equivalent), with gig1, and call weekends for £55.
I said remove the fluff, not interested in TV, this changed to £70 something pounds for gig1 alone, nothing else. Thats right, the price increased for removing things from the package.

I told him as polite as I reasonably could, are you even trying to keep me as a customer. I reminded him I could order cityfibre and I am aware people are getting retention deals for gig1 at £35. He changed tact, he told me I have troublesome install fees to deal with and VM's quality makes the much higher price good value, paying for a TV service I have no interest in is amazing value, and I am unreasonable expecting a price that others get and my previous price is only for new customers.

I then wanted to clarify something with him, were his offers volt deals, or were they just flat straight up gig1. At first he didnt reply, confused. I asked him a second time, and he said keeping the O2 sim was a requirement. So in effect he tried to sell me 500M broadband for over £70 month, which is higher than the list price of the tariff on VM's website. (as is also the case for my automatic out of contract price increase).

At this point I rage cancelled which still took over 20 minutes, he kept insisting O2 needs to be cancelled, but I explained I want to keep my number so that will be handled by myself with PAC system. Eventually he did the cancellation.

I checked the email link after call, was a "page doesnt exist" so invalidated.

I will likely be filling in Ofcom's VM retention/cancellation complaints form as this process, inconsistent pricing etc. is ridiculous.

As of today I still dont have any attempt to keep me, no outbound retentions call, cut off date is 2nd week of May.

Now as it turns out, CityFibre was not a empty threat, they changed their stance on the MDU classification and I ended up getting connected really quickly, typing this out on a FTTP connection.

So yeah, its a shame, as the VM service was decent, I just couldnt take the shenanigans they do on renewal, and their tripling of price if not locking in to new contract.

Also forgot to mention, is the offshore retentions call centre.