Thinking of Leaving Us?

Actors looking for handy sidelines in voice work should try the Virgin Media helpline. That's where you can hear the magic combination of "slightly sexy" and "reassuringly businesslike" - not too posh, no identifiable region - that is the voice any corporation must employ if they have frenzied customers reaching the final stages of exasperation and despair. Which Virgin Media certainly does. We've just spent two days without broadband: fine if you're on a beach somewhere and you can gloat about all the sad people sending you plaintive messages; not fine if you are juggling four jobs at once and trying to keep at least one step ahead of the deadline police.

Sadly, it was only on the morning of the third day that I began to understand Virgin's cunning ploy for diverting its frustrated clientele. When you ring the Virgin number, Ms Jolly Helpful's bright-eyed, bushy-tailed voice welcomes you to Virgin Media and says "we now have three options for you" as though that was just what you'd been hoping to hear. If you've got a fault with your broadband obviously you don't go for (1) paying your bill or (2) changing your service, changing your address or "thinking of leaving us". You go for (3) talking about your installation, or reporting a fault. Then you get two options: was that "installation" you wanted, or "a fault"? A fault, of course. Ms JH's voice gets a tad more husky but a tad more urgent, too. "Right, let's get you some help!" But not quite yet: there are four more options to choose from. TV? No. Phone? No. Dial-up? No. Broadband? At last! There is an ominous pause: the time it takes to connect you to Bangalore, where an extremely polite but minimally-trained person will tell you what you already guessed: that there is a problem with the system and the engineers are working on it as hard as they can right now. So basically the message is: don't call back: we're not going to tell you anything anyway.

Why did it not occur to me for two whole days that, while this was exactly the route that Virgin wanted me to follow, there was another route I could have taken, had I not been fooled by the plaintive tone that entered Ms Jolly's voice when she mentioned the unthinkable option: "if you're thinking of leaving us". Because, I suppose, I have slipped imperceptibly some time in the last decade from being a founder member of the Rock 'n' Roll Generation to becoming a late arrival in the Slow On the Uptake Generation (also known as The Elderly - for the first time in my life I have joined the same demographic as my parents).

Obviously, I now realise, if you ring up Virgin Media and tell them you are thinking of leaving them, you are put through in a trice to a sensible chap (you can tell this right away by his Geordie accent) who has been extremely well trained to (a) listen carefully to what the customer has to say, (b) agree with them completely and (c) sell them a product. Simon (he even had a name) was almost as dismayed by the size of our phone bill as we are, and in five minutes had persuaded us to move to a different, cheaper package that would save us loads of money and to which he could switch us over immediately. To my stumbling enquiry as to whether I could see something in writing first he explained that no, sadly, this was an offer that was only available through the Complaints Department - a department which, as it happens, cannot communicate on paper.

So that's where I'd got to! The Complaints Department! How odd that Ms Helpful never mentioned it. What's more, Simon could offer us yet another deal (merely requiring a 12-month contract) which would save us yet more loads of money on calls to mobiles and 0845 numbers. I said I'd think about it if he could just get our broadband working again, whereupon I was switched to another nice man called Mike who talked me through a few moves to "recalibrate our computer" and hey presto, here I am blogging about it all only 10 hours and 78 e-mails later.

By a strange coincidence, I then went to the gym where who should I see on Sky Sunrise but Neil Berkett (neil.berkett@virginmedia.co.uk), the current ruler of this empire, celebrating Virgin Media's 6% increase in profits and their roll-out of their new 100mb broadband service, currently being installed in selected parts of North London (that explains a lot. And this is of course what news mainly does these days, recycles corporate press releases). I'm not surprised Virgin are doing well: who cares about the actual service if you can be cheered up by Ms Jolly Helpful, and, if you are cunning enough to press the right button, to have the lovely but well-hidden Simon and Mike promise you loads of money?

I think I'll just hang in there a bit though before I become a complete Virgin groupie. What I'm waiting for is that Mr Berkett to realise that the real future for Virgin Media should be a mutual one. How much more willingly would I sign up to that 12-month contract if I knew that Simon and Mike were getting their own slice of that 6%?