Virgin East Coast 4

Yesterday, realising it had been a week since I'd last had any contact with Virgin East Coast support, I dropped them a line to find out what was going on. Given that they'd generally been pretty quick to reply and deal with things initially (albeit in ways that didn't really seem to fix the problem) it seemed odd that they'd gone so quiet.

I've had a reply this morning:

Dear Dave

Thank you for your email chaser today with regards to the Mobile app that you registered on and now cannot sign into it to test the device before you book.

I am sorry to hear that you have not been in receipt of a reply with regards to this and as such I will try and solve this for you now.

We did not receive anything back from our second line support team and as such we may need to do more troubleshooting before we chase this with them.

Please can you confirm if you have actually registered on the desktop version of our web site please?

I know that you stated that you have signed up for the mobile app and registered on this but your email address does not show on our system as being registered so we just want to ensure that we have explored all areas.

Once we have this from you we can then add this to the valuable information that you have already provided and chase this up for you.

Honestly, this is starting to get silly now. I don't mind so much that they've been slow in getting back to me on the problem because they've been waiting on "second line support" to get back to them, but that doesn't seem to really make sense in the light of them saying afterwards that my email address doesn't even show in their system.

Really, if they can "see" that I'm not even registered in their system, why would they have passed things to "second line support"? That makes no sense.

But, actually, it gets even worse. During my original phone conversion with them the lady I spoke to made the exact same claim. She told me that my email address wasn't even in the system, hadn't been registered via the website. Of course it had (I even sent the initial message for support from their website, while logged in). I pointed this out and she went off to look into it; she came back to say it was there now. When I asked what had happened she mumbled something about how there'd been a problem and she'd got someone to fix it.

No, I have no exact details about it, but quite simply she said I wasn't in the system, I provided her good evidence I was and then she made "magic" happen and suddenly I was visible.

But, now, apparently, I'm not visible again.

Either someone at Virgin East Coast is fibbing to me, or their system has a bad habit of losing people's details. It's not like I'm so stupid to think I've registered but actually haven't. I can log into the website with the details I registered with. I've had a member of staff confirm I'm in the system. I've had subsequent support chats take place where the person I'm dealing with is satisfied that I exist in the system. I even had them ask me to try and reset my password -- something I imagine isn't possible if you've not even registered with the system yet!

This is getting really silly now. This is possibly getting beyond silly.

The serious side of this is, of course, I can't trust the Virgin East Coast website or their booking system, so I have to continue using a third party, which means Virgin still get to grab an extra tenner off me on every trip so I can have WiFi and get some work done.