UK cellular carrier fined $28m for hanging up on people calling to cancel

Virgin Media was fined $28m by regulators in the U.K. for preventing customers from canceling contracts. The method was not especially sophisticated: its agents would simply hang up on customers who asked to or leave, or put them on hold until they hung up themselves.

Ofcom's investigation began after it received complaints about the company, and it reports receiving 1881 in total. It also found that agents would also use unnecessary transfers to stymie customer requests and mishandled millions of calls over a three-year period to prevent them switching to other providers or get better deals. Ofcom blamed the company's commission scheme, which encouraged call center agents to behave this way, financially rewarded them for doing so, and established a two-tier system of agent that made it impossible to cancel without speaking to at least two.

Some customers were forced to cancel through their banks and card providers; when they did so, Ofcom reports, Virgin Media dinged their credit scores.

We uncovered widespread and, in many cases, deliberate mishandling of calls by retention team agents. Behaviours and tactics included: repeated attempts to pressure customers to stay, even when they had made it clear they wanted to cancel; unnecessary or excessive call transfers to other departments; excessively, unnecessarily and repeatedly keeping customers on hold; deliberately dropping calls; and failing to process cancellations on the system.

Virgin Media effectively encouraged the use of these behaviours to deter customers from cancelling by financially rewarding them through its commission scheme. Its training and guidance for agents also failed to prevent these behaviours while inadequate quality assurance and monitoring meant they were often overlooked. Additionally, the company did not have proper oversight of its third-party call centres or quality monitoring. 

The scenario described is typical of companies where "the metric becomes the measure"—not deadly in itself, but always lethal when combined with general incompetence and malice. Virgin Media has long been noted as the worst major broadband provider for customer service in the U.K. Which Magazine's Yvette Fletcher tore it thoroughly years ago:

Virgin Media was the worst performing big broadband firm for customer service – our analysis showed it received the worst ratings for overall customer service, the ease and speed of getting a response, and its technical support. It received a disappointing satisfaction score of 38 (out of a possible +100) for overall customer service – the lowest of the thirteen providers we looked at. Its scores for technical support and the ease and speed of getting in touch were even worse: 34 and 26 respectively. 

Virgin accepted the verdict and admitted its failures, giving it a reduced fine. This seems a bit generous, given that the UK has now established a new regulatory regime on providers which means cancellation happens automatically when porting to a new one, but at least it got done.