Virgin Mobile gets into a sticker situation

What is it about Virgin and its unfailing ability to rescue miserable defeat from the jaws of a simple victory?
If you’ve seen Simon Dare’s blog, you will have come across a succession of problems with Virgin Media and Virgin Mobile, where an issue crops up, Virgin promises faithfully and sincerely to intervene at the highest level…and nothing much happens.
Add my daughter’s Virgin Mobile to the list. In one fell swoop Virgin has ensured that it will lose a customer and that poor old Blackberry, whose commercial woes are bad enough as it is, will be avoided like the plague.
In the process, it’s also hidden behind unfair and unreasonable assumptions, but we’ll come on to that.
My eldest daughter has a Blackberry Curve on a contract bought through the Virgin Mobile shop on Clumber Street. It’s gone without a hitch until this summer, when the phone started to freeze regularly.
The Virgin shop said this wasn’t uncommon and suggested we try to update its software. Bad move: it froze permanently and wouldn’t reboot. Still, it was under warranty.
So, I called Virgin technical support and they decided it should be sent off for either replacement or repair. It would, I was assured, be a straightforward process which would take only a few days.
As Simon Dare’s experiences have shown, ‘straightforward’ doesn’t mean the same thing to Virgin’s customer service procedures as it does to you or me.
Today, I took a call from Donna in customer support (who was unfailingly polite, by the way). She explained that the manufacturer (i.e., a Blackberry technician) had looked at the phone and seen a mark on a sticker inside the back of the phone.
On that basis, Virgin concluded that someone might have gained “unauthorised access” to the phone, there was a risk a “third party” might have fiddled with it, and – who knows – may be they caused the fault? Therefore, The Warranty Will Not Be Honoured. Hurrah for Virgin Mobile – that’ll be a flat fee of £50 to have your phone repaired, please!
No. It won’t.
Let’s dissect this ludicrous scenario.
1) I have no idea what the mark on the sticker was. Virgin could get hold of a photo of the mark but said it wasn’t their policy to show the photos to customers! The only way I could see it was if they sent the phone back to me, still broken. Fail Number 1
2) The user of the phone is my 13 year-old daughter. While she’s certainly intelligent, she doesn’t know one end of a circuit board from another and, as far as I’m aware, has yet to study electrical engineering. The idea that she – or anyone else – “tampered” with it somewhere between comedy and defamation. Fail Number 2
3) Virgin Mobile has no evidence that the phone has actually been tampered with. It has simply concluded that this “might” have happened. And with a mountain of non-evidence in its possession it has decided not to honour the contract. Great business ethics, eh? Fail Number 3
4) £50 to repair a two year-old basic Blackberry? They’re worth buttons…Fail Number 4
5) I asked Donna to escalate my complaint, so she went away and spoke to someone. The answer was depressingly, pathetically predictable: rules are rules. Fail Number 5
6) Congratulations – you’ve finally reached the end of the process and the customer has been lost! Fail Number 6.
I put across the insanity of this whole scenario to Donna, but she – and her supervisor – appeared to be imprisoned inside a process which had decided that the chance of a quick £50 based on some threadbare assumptions was better than keeping a customer.
This isn’t a story with a happy ending. Simon Dare’s experiences tell me nothing will come from Virgin Mobile (unless you know otherwise, Graeme Oxby). And my daughter has a spare phone, not her Blackberry. They’ve let down a child.
We are, at least, wiser in two ways. The contract with Virgin Mobile won’t be renewed because it can’t be relied upon and its idea of customer service appears to be that the customer is guilty and will serve Virgin Mobile. It decided to walk away from a warranty on the basis of unfair and unreasonable assumptions for which it did not have conclusive supporting evidence.
A lawyer would rip it to shreds. So, I suspect, would an electronics engineer.
And my daughter’s next phone won’t be a Blackberry. They appear to wear out and be prone to strange marks on that immensely complicated component called ‘the sticker inside the back’. These marks can cause your phone to be unusable and expensive, it seems.
Bye-bye Virgin Mobile. It’s not been nice doing business with you.

127 Hours of shopping

I have Claire Bicknell to thank for this latest analysis of the way retailers hook different generations (for which read ‘grumpy old man’s rant against the dying of the light’)

There we were, sitting have a nice coffee in Carluccio’s and talking over Smith Cooper’s plans for world domination (well, a move into the Lace Market anyway) when she reminded me of a Tweet I made after a demoralising experience in Primark. That’s all it took for me to go off on one.

I felt cornered in Primark because I literally couldn’t see the wood for the trees. While my daughters sifted through what seemed to me like a forest of tat-inspired jewellery, I stood there, waffled on about why cheap jewellery is still poor value when it doesn’t last five minutes, and then realised I was completely disorientated. I wanted to dive for the exit, but couldn’t see a way out of the jewellery section.

It reminded me of that scene in the late, lamented Father Ted, where a bunch of Roman Catholic priests get lost in the lingerie section in an Irish department store. Only it wasn’t that furtively interesting.

I did escape eventually, but it was further evidence that blokes of my age (that’s ahem-and-a-bit, since you’re asking), become a tragic cross between a wallet and a spare part when they go shopping with the family.

Now, a part of that is because my idea of ‘shopping’ involves coffee and a book in Waterstones and, er, that’s it. If I’m really feeling sociable I might take in the home technology (read ‘boys’ toys’) department in John Lewis or the wines section pretty much anywhere. But it’s also because I can’t believe the routine lack of anything resembling great service which lies underneath these margins.

Fashion is where I stand and issue a series of utterly futile observations about these retail margins while my daughters smile, nod and just get on with assembling a stylish combo that would never occur to a sartorial car-crash like me.

But it is MY wallet which these combos depend on. This is why I would rather stand in for that bloke in 127 Hours than get dragged into the likes of Jack Wills. Now, any sane person would imagine that if a girl wants a gilet you can get one for a few quid in Decathlon. It’ll have the street cred of horsey overtones, so what’s the problem? The problem is that it hasn’t got Jack Wills plastered all over it, and this massive enhancement to its technical capabilities means that instead of a couple of tenners you can hand over 98 of your English pounds for the privilege of advertising someone else’s brand.

The thing is, as insane as it sounds it is also inevitable.

On some days of the week I drop my eldest daughter off at school and you have only to look at the bags and accessories she and her mates attack the campus with to know that Brand Is Everything. Jack Wills is still well up there, but the rising stars are the likes of Hollister and (if you can get your hands on it) Abercrombie and Fitch. You might occasionally see some Boden or Joules, but that’s clearly stuff your mum bought for you. The horror of it!
Fashion accessories are not just things you wear, either. They are things you text from and listen to. So you’ve got an iPhone? Well, OK, but is it an iPhone 4? The only vaguely credible alternative is a Blackberry. That’s right – a Blackberry. In school. They should read John Lyle’s life without an iPhone.
I probably need to go and have another coffee. Only problem is that if it’s the weekend I’ll probably bump into my daughter’s generation sipping some over-priced smoothie.
So I am going back into my darkened room instead.