Why Virgin Mobile South Africa sucks…

If you’re one of my followers on Twitter or you’re a friend of mine on Facebook (or even if you know me in the real world), you’ll know of my deep-seated dislike of Virgin mobile South Africa.

I was a very loyal MTN subscriber for close-on 10 years but as has been the case with MTN, the gradual fall in customer service quality and the general lack of concern the company has for keeping its existing customers happy over acquiring new one – and I decided to cancel my decade-old contract for “greener pastures”

Virgin Mobile had all the great promises – the lowest call rates in South Africa, no contract tie-ins, free text messages, true per-second billing and a very low per/MB rate for its data traffic.  Heck, they even had the phone I wanted so badly at that point in time (Nokia E90), so it looked like heaven compared to MTN.

I suppose I should have noticed the first warning signs when it took me three visits to the Virgin Mobile Sandton City retail store in order to sign up for the package that I wanted.

Two of the three times I was told that “the system is down” – an excuse that would become the most spoken phrase at Virgin Mobile over coming months – even if they didn’t know it yet.

I eventually ended up signing a 24-month package with Virgin Mobile.  And so began my slow decent into mobile phone hell.

And here’s why:

• After about 3 months, my Nokia died and had to be sent in for repair. It took Virgin Mobile over a month to fix a simple software glitch – FAIL
• In October 2008, Virgin Mobile “migrated to a new system”, which sent their billing and other systems into total disarray. To date, errors that were caused by the system migration still persist and the migration is still being blamed by call centre agents as the cause for billing and Vrewards problems – FAIL
• On the subject of Vrewards – the system has been broken from day one. Virgin Mobile claims that its Vrewards have real cash value – which they initially did. But later Virgin Mobile decided to change these “real cash” Vrewards to airtime, which is now credited to your account – even though the pre-recorded message on their phone lines still claims that their Vrewards have “real cash value” – FAIL
• Free unlimited SMS packages were falsely advertised as so and are now subject to a draconian “fair usage policy” – FAIL
• Virgin Mobile piggy-back on Cell C’s GSM network as a virtual network operator. Cell C’s network is not the best when it comes to coverage and quality of service – and as a result dropped calls, “Network Busy” errors and terrible data speeds are a sad reality for Virgin Mobile subscribers – FAIL
• The claimed “super fast” data network is based on Cell C’s Edge network and is slow, continually times out and has some of the biggest latency issues I’ve ever seen. 3G is not even on Cell C’s radar – EPIC FAIL
• Earlier this year, Virgin decided to “bring it’s 1-year free itemised billing” to an end and automatically slapped R20 extra onto my account – which, despite having been asked to stop it, is still being charged to my account – FAIL
• The average hold time on Virgin mobile’s call centre line is 20 minutes – FAIL
• The company’s call centre agents have no power whatsoever – they continually over-promise and under deliver, never call back when they promise to do so and are merely a mechanism for blaming continual system problems for the ongoing issues that Virgin Mobile has. – FAIL
• Virgin Mobile’s network is horribly broken. It takes numerous attempts to make a call. “Network Busy” seems to be Virgin’s new payoff line. – FAIL

There are all sorts of rumours going around about the future of Virgin mobile in South Africa – especially because of uncertainty around Cell C’s future and I, for one, am scratching together every cent I have to get myself out of this God-forsaken 24-month agreement.

Admittedly, all I need to do is pay the outstanding balance on my phone and Virgin will “set me free” (unlike the jail sentence that MTN or Vodacom tie you into when you sign a contract with one of them) – there are no penalties for cancelling contracts early.

The only thing is, with the total and utter incompetence that Virgin Mobile staff demonstrate on a daily basis, am I willing to take the risk of paying R3,500 to Virgin to cancel my agreement and then sit with a six-month battle to stop the debit orders and subsequent wrongful credit bureau blacklisting that Virgin is all too happy to slap onto innocent people.

We’ll have to see.  But one thing is certain, Virgin Mobile is doomed to failure if they carry on the way they do – and I’ll put money on it, by 2010, they’ll be gone.

Richard Branson would be ashamed.