I am a customer of Virgin Media and have been since January of this year. Let me be clear, they are generally very good. The fault number (151) is served by English people during the week if the call volume is low, and Indian people if the call volume is high or at the weekend. The English customer service is fantastic and cannot be faulted. The Indian… well…
Yesterday my cable broadband died. Being an IT guy I did some self-diagnosis before calling. I checked the light on the Cable TV box and made sure that was flashing and looked at the error there of No Return Path. OK, now I know that means the UBR (Universal Broadband Router) is having some trouble. The Virgin Media engineer I spoke to told me so. I logged into the modem itself on 192.168.100.1 and noticed that:
MAP w/initial maintenance region received
No Ranging Response received – T3 time-out
MAP w/initial maintenance region received
No Ranging Response received – T3 time-out
Again, that’s excellent. It just means the upstream is all dead but downstream is fine. This usually ends up being an area fault, and area faults are usually raised out of volume of calls. The more people that call in with the same fault in an area alerts the relevant area of engineers. So, I make the call:
Me: Hi, my broadband isn’t working
CS: OK, what is your name please?
Me: Packham
CS: OK Mr Packham that is a problem I can help you with.
(How does he know that, he has no idea he can help or not… so why say he can?)
CS: Could you tell me what lights are flashing on the modem Mr. Packham
(This drives me crazy, stop repeating my name on the end of every sentence… please!)
Me: The sync light is fully on and the ready light is flashing. The modem pages are telling me that it is failing to lock an upstream link and the TV box is also flashing indicating the same.
CS: I have no knowledge of TV problems Mr Packham. Let me take a look at the modem
CS: Are you running Windows Vista or Windows XP?
Me: What relevance has that got to diagnosing a cable modem fault? I’m running a Mac
… silence …
CS: Ok this is odd Mr. Packham. It looks like there’s no modem activated on your account. Let me send a reset code to your modem.
… pause …
CS: The modem should now reset
Me: It hasn’t
CS: Let’s wait a little amount of time
… pause …
CS: Now?
Me: No
(clearly a communication fault and this guy is following an awful script)
CS: Let me try again
… sigh …
CS: It should reset now
Me: No
CS: Ok remove all cables from the back of the modem, wait 30 seconds and plug them back in.
… I remove the power cable knowing full well that the other cables make no odds at all …
… pause …
Me: I’ll plug them all back in now
CS: Yes please Mr. Packham
Me: Ok it’s booting
Me: And the same problem
CS: Ok let’s book an engineer
Most of that could be skipped. Whenever I have called and had the English call center, we tend to get to the book an engineer point a lot quicker. Mainly because they understand me. I can reel off what I have checked. I usually do things like remove the splitter etc. and try different cables to make sure. I can tell them that, they’ll listen and they will get it sorted a lot quicker.
It just sums up why Indian Call Centers are bad. It’s not their English, nor their intelligence. The issue is they don’t live here. They’ll never have had Virgin Media cable either. They’ll of seen pictures of the equipment involved but no idea really how it all hangs together. They don’t know how to tell the difference between an IT professional calling vs. a mother with 4 screaming brats. They just follow a script. A poorly written one at that. I can imagine that if they deviate from the script they get scalded for it. It’s a crying shame.
At least I can understand why the Status page lacks updates. English engineers are, by their very nature, lazy. They get the job done, and are super efficient, but they never update tickets. The Twitter guys appears to be on the ball though. It pleases me that they are responding to my Tweets and are at least saying they’ll find out why things like the Status page isn’t getting updated.
Thankfully, my 3G dongle is plugged into my FreeBSD server and providing me with some sort of Internet access.
The other thing worth adding about this is that at least it is getting looked at. BT are awful by comparison. Is Virgin Media therefore just the best of a bad bunch? I’ll let you know when the service comes back. I’m just looking forward to upgrading to 50Mbps at the new lower price next month.
I’ve found the best way to deal with scripted support people is to not try and deviate them from their script – oddly it works out much faster for you. Don’t tell them anything unless they ask. Yes, you may very well know what the problem is, but I’ve found it quicker to let them work through their checklist, and let them suss it out. I’ve tried phoning support lines in the past and saying ‘It’s X, you need to do Y’ and that just confuses them because they often have no idea how to do Y – until the script tells them to.
Best avenue of support for VM is the newsgroups anyway. I’ve used them a few times and they’ve resolved issues quickly. They’re UK-based, and you can give them a ton of info (log dumps from the modem for example) and they’ll usually diagnose stuff within an hour. OK, not quite so immediate, but if you’re in no major rush, it’s good.
Yeah, can’t access virginmedia. without being on Virgin Media however. My main gripe is that the script is just so wrong and I don’t appreciate customer service drones. It’s just companies trying to save money by hiring monkeys to do the job.