Oh Dear, Virgin Media Business

One of the reasons for paying for a business level Internet service is the SLA. There are other benefits like lower contention but for me, it's knowing that when it goes wrong, I can expect it to be fixed.

When my Virgin Media Business link went out over the Easter weekend, I thought "no problems. 24/7 support and a 24 hour fix time." Unfortunately, it didn't turn out quite as expected.


First problem was trying to file a fault over Easter. Eventually I had to wait until Tuesday in order to do that. The first call back happend just outside the promised 2 hour window. That simply told me what I knew, the Superhub was not working so they promised to send an engineer out with a new one.

After almost giving up and deciding to take to Twitter to moan about the poor service, Dave the engineer arrived and we changed over the hub. All good? No!
Before we could set the new superhub up we needed to delete the old one from the line. Problem. The only person who could do that had gone home. What was that about 24/7 support? Dave left the new hub with me and went home, after all, there was nothing he could do.

This morning, I wait a reasonable time for a call before having another go over Twitter. Result! Call from Adam in the resolution team. Well, almost a result. Yes an engineer would be calling me but surely I realised I was mistaken about the SLA?

Adam then proceeded to explqin that in Virgin Media Business terms, 24 hours is really 24 working hours even if it doesn't quite say that. Stunned, I asked the Twitterverse what it thought. The result ws unanimous. Virgin Media Business was taking the preverbial.

Next stop, ring the press office and ask for an immediate statement about why Virgin Media Business was misleading business users. Speed Commnications promised to get a statement but I'm still waiting for that.

Meanwhile, with some help from Johnny in Peterborough, we eventually got the circuit back up and running. Hurrah!
A few minutes later and Adam is back on the phone. His bad, I was right and the SLA was 24 hours, he got mixed up with the very old SLA. He also accepted they were in breach and refunded a months line rental.

Had Virgin Media Business kept their contractual promise there would have been no refund, no Twitter embarassment and a happy customer.
The lesson here for customers is always use social media to highlight poor service and always be ready to quote the SLA.

UPDATE
Still no update from Speed Communications. They seem to believe that it is not their problem to get a formal statement from their client