It's now another Tuesday morning. It's the Tuesday morning after the previous Tuesday morning when I was waiting on some sort of call from Virgin regarding the missing refund. After I wrote that last post I dropped the chap I'd spoken to an email to chase up what was happening. This was his reply:

I am sorry that I was not able to contact you yesterday as this system switchover is happening we are going through an extremely busy period in the business. I have looked into your case and have reissued the cheque that you did not receive and that should be with you shortly.

Under normal circumstances I'd imagine a cheque sent in the post would arrive within a couple of working days. Given that was last Tuesday I think it's fair to say that it should have turned up by last Friday.

Thing is, when I'd spoken to that chap the week before he'd assured me that they'd send this cheque by recorded delivery to ensure that it got through.

I still don't have the cheque.

I guess this means one of 3 things has happened:

• He said he'd sent it, but he hadn't.
• He did send it, but not via recorded delivery, and it's disappeared into whatever black hole snail mail from Virgin East Coast seems to be disappearing into.
• He did send it, via recorded delivery, and we now have some clue as to where the above black hole is located.

Whatever the cause, I'm going to have to drop him a line again and find out what's happening.

On a previous post about this issue my friend Mark raised an interesting issue: if Virgin had lost access to the required data because they'd ceased using the services of some third party (as was claimed), what did this mean in data protection terms? I'd not really considered this but it was a fair question. When I last emailed Virgin I asked about this too:

As an aside, could I also ask who's a good person to speak to about what was happening with my data during the period Virgin East Coast didn't have access to it? Thanks.

That question got this reply:

The data is still with us as a company it is just in the process of being uploaded onto our systems. The information has never left our company it is just in the process of being updated onto our systems.

For now, at least, I'm happy enough with that as an explanation. I'm going to apply Hanlon's Razor to this and assume it was just clumsy wording when the subject first came up.

So, to summarise this situation so far: a late journey that happened back on June 2nd, for which compensation was confirmed in email on June 6th, the cheque for which was supposed to turn up early July at the latest, still hasn't appeared by August 8th. Worse still, I've been told 3 times now that "the cheque is in the post" and on at least one of those occasions it appears to have been an outright fib due to the closing of some of their systems.

On top of the above, there's another contact I'm awaiting that has yet to happen. Last week, when I tweeted about the previous post, the Virgin East Coast twitter people asked me to provide them with my contact details.

@davepdotorg Dave, can you DM us your contact details? ^AD

— Virgin Trains EC (@Virgin_TrainsEC) July 29, 2016

I checked with them why they needed the details (given that they're obviously already on the system) and they said that they'd escalated it to the "Managing Director's office" and that they wanted my contact details so that office could contact me. I provided them and also pointed out that email is normally the best way to contact me -- they then asked for the best email address to contact me on and I provided that too.

Having done that I was told they'd be in touch "next week". In this case "next week" was any time last week (as of the time of writing and publishing).

Nobody got in contact last week. Nobody from a "Managing Director's Office", nobody at all from Virgin East Coast.

So, as of right now, I'm waiting on the following from Virgin East Coast, all promised by them:

• A reply as to what's happening with the inability to log in with the Ticket Wallet application (outstanding since 2016-07-15, although really outstanding from a while before then).
• A cheque that was supposed to have been sent via recorded delivery on 2016-08-02.
• Some form of contact from the "Managing Director's office" that was promised on 2016-07-29 and which was supposed to have happened some time between 2016-08-01 and 2016-08-05. This contact to, in part, deal with the two contact failures above.

The unwillingness or inability to stay in contact with a customer who has problems does seem to be a persistent pattern. One that seems to go to the top.

Right, time to publish this and start sending out even more chase-up emails. I guess it gives me something to keep me busy when I'm on the train.

It's Tuesday morning. That means it's the day after Virgin said they'd call me back to deal with the refund issue from last Friday. I've not had a call back. That's the second time now I've been told they'll call me back on a specific date and I've had nothing.

Right now I'm missing a callback about the refund and some sort of update on the ticket wallet issue (which was promised "very soon" back on July 15th).

I'm also waiting for some sort of contact from another party in the organisation that I was promised via DM on twitter last Friday. No sign of that either (although no timescale was given for that).

It's starting to get a little tedious, always having to be the one to chase things up.

But chase them up I will...

Given it's been a couple of weeks, I thought I'd write a little update on the fun and games with Virgin East Coast. I'll also add another little "problem" into the mix in this post -- something that has been happening in the background and didn't seem to be an issue to start with.

As mentioned a couple of weeks back, I dropped them a line to chase things up (pointing out that the scheduled callback was long overdue) and got this reply on the 15th:

Thank you for your email reply and apologies that I did not call you on the 11th I must have missed my Outlook reminder.

I have today again tried to call our second line support team to query this again and see how far they are with this however they have not picked up so I have emailed them once again.

Last time I spoke to them on the phone the person said that it should only be a few more days so hopefully I will be emailing you again very soon with some more substantial information on this for you.

As I write this it's the 29th and I've had no update. I guess this is the problem with phrases like "very soon" -- you're never quite sure if you should read it to mean in the next couple of days, or if 14 days later still falls within "very soon". Personally, if it was me, I'd be dropping a line along the way to say "it's taking longer than I'd like, but I'm still on it". You know, that thing of ensuring the customer doesn't feel like they've been forgotten about.

So, very soon¹, I guess I'll be sending another follow-up email to try and find out what's going on. I'll update when I do.

Meanwhile.... there's another issue that's brewing.

Back at the start of June I was on a train that was delayed by more than half an hour. This is the first time this has happened to me since I've been using the trains a lot and I was delighted to find that they make a point of letting you know that you're entitled to a refund on your ticket, depending on how late you are.

That struck me as very sensible and very civilised.

So, when I finally got home, I put in my claim and on June 6th I got an email confirming I was entitled to a 50% refund and that it would be sent as a cheque to me within 28 days.

Of course, 28 days later, nothing had turned up. I called them shortly after that to find out what was going on. They claimed the cheque had been sent and suggested it had got lost on the way (in the 2 years I've been at this address it's the first time I've knowingly had mail disappear). Anyway, they cancelled that cheque and issued another, apologising for the hassle and promising that the new one would be with me within a week.

As it was I wasn't around for a couple of weeks after that so I got home yesterday, expecting to see the cheque on my doormat. I expected incorrectly.

I've called them about it again today and was told the most interesting story: apparently they can't help me right now because they've closed down a call centre down in Plymouth (I think it was), which was "outsourced", and they now no longer have access to the "computer system" with all the cases in it. They assured me that they'd get access to it within the next week or two.

Let that settle in for a moment: they apparently arranged to close down a call centre without ensuring that the computer systems that contain (some of?) their customers' data were handed over in some way, shape or form.

That's a touch worrying.

As you might imagine, I wasn't terribly pleased by this news. I'm a couple of months on from when the delay happened and I still don't have the cheque. On top of that, not having received the second attempt at sending it, I find out that nothing was likely being done about it because they'd (apparently) dropped the staff/company who would have been dealing with it. And I had to phone them (again) to find out.

I imagine that if I'd just left it to them to get in contact and let me know, I'd have waited and waited and never got anything at all.

Anyway, long story short, after pointing out that it was a bit much to ask me to let them hold onto my money even longer, just because of their system and business issues, I was passed to someone else who was able to suggest a far better and far quicker method of resolving this.

So: I'm expecting a call back from them on Monday to get that process under way. I wonder if this callback will happen?

Remember this?

I will schedule in a contact back for you for Monday 11th July and after chasing them about this again I will contact you to let you know what is happening with this now.

Well, it's now Thursday 14th and I've not had a peep out of them.

I'm on a train today. I'm actually writing this on a train. I guess I'll have to think about chasing them up tomorrow (or perhaps at least chasing them up in email today).

Little update on the Virgin East Coast Ticket Wallet app saga. After my previous reply to them I got a reply back yesterday:

Dear Mr Pearson

Many thanks for your email dated 6th July 2016 regarding the fact that you cannot sign into your Virgin Trains ticket wallet app after registering on the desktop version of our website with the email address davep.org+virgin@gmail.com.

I firstly apologise for the lack of understanding on the part of our Virgin Trains East Coast Web Support team with regards to this, the Mobile ticket issue on our app that you have described is one that has not occurred very frequently at all for any of our customers and as such this is what is causing the difficulty in resolving this for you.

I have today spoken to our second line support team and asked them the question of if there is soon to be a fix for this for you to which they have stated that they need a few more days to get this fixed.

I will schedule in a contact back for you for Monday 11th July and after chasing them about this again I will contact you to let you know what is happening with this now.

While it's taken quite a while, it looks like I'm finally making some progress. If I'm reading it right they finally acknowledge that there is a problem and that it needs fixing. It's frustrating that I've had to go backwards and forwards a few times to get to this point.

Monday will be interesting.

It's been over a week now since I last had contact with customer services and there's still been no word. So, earlier today, I sent off an email. Short and sweet, requesting that I possibly get an answer to the questions I'd asked them:

Hi, it's over a week now since I answered the couple of questions you asked and asked a couple of my own. Is it possible to get a reply and an update on what's happening?

Later on in the day I got a reply:

Dear Dave

Thank you for your email dated 6th June 2016 concerning the tickets that you have not booked with us yet and the fact that your Mobile App ticket wallet is not able to show you anything after you have installed it.

I am sorry to hear that there has been a mix up with the confirming to you if your email address has been registered or not and a such I wish to clarify this for you, also that there has been such a delay in responding to you.

I can now confirm that your email address davep.org+virgin@gmail.com is registered on our website and that you have signed up for our Ticket wallet app successfully. We apologise for telling you that it was not but this could well have been that we were searching your email address that you have been emailing us from and this is what has caused the confusion.

With regards to the use of our Ticket Wallet app before you have made a booking with us either on that or on our desktop site, it is believed that you will not be able to see much at all within the app before you make a booking with us however we have made the raise about this for you and we chased this up on the 27th June when you emailed us previously.

I will chase this up again however if possible please confirm what page you get to in the ticket wallet app at the moment so that we can identify if this is normal for a customer has no booking allocated to the app.

At this point I'm starting to seriously consider the idea that I'm being trolled. To start with, there's this bit:

concerning the tickets that you have not booked with us yet

It's hard not to read that as sarcasm. Any way I look at it it comes across as sarcasm. Sure, of course I've not booked any tickets direct with them (although I have booked lots of tickets with them this year via other websites) because of the issue -- that's the damn issue!

Anyway, possible over-sensitivity on my part aside...

The reply still seems to think that the problem is that I'm not seeing tickets I've not booked inside the Ticket Wallet app. That isn't the problem. The problem, as I clearly stated from the very start, is that I can't even log into the app. I. CAN'T. LOG. IN!

I've said this plenty of times. I've made it very clear that this is the problem. And still I'm being asked:

please confirm what page you get to in the ticket wallet app

I'm really wondering what part of "I can't even log into the app" is so hard to understand.

On the other hand, at least I've now got my second confirmation of the fact that I do actually have an account on their website, after being told I don't. I suppose that's something.

Meanwhile.... the Ticket Wallet app is still telling me that my user name or password are incorrect.

PS: "Thank you for your email dated 6th June 2016" -- it's July, not June.

Quick update on where things are at with the attempt to get help with the apparent inability to log into the Virgin East Coast Ticket Wallet app using an otherwise perfectly valid account...

As mentioned yesterday I had an email from them. I replied (after writing yesterday's blog post):

I'm very concerned and very confused by your question about if I've even registered with the main website. Yes, I have. I've confirmed this more than once now. During my first phone conversation with support I was told I wasn't in the system and then, when I demonstrated that I had to be, I was magically "found" after some magic "fix" was applied on the fly. Now I'm being told I don't exist again.

I seem to be going backwards with this rather than going forwards, and what's even more frustrating is that any question I ask seems to get ignored while I keep being asked the same basic questions time and again.

Yes, I did register with the main website. That's how I found there was an Android app that works with it. That's how I followed the link to it. That's how I found the support report form and managed to drop you a line in the first place.

So, just so I'm 100% clear on this: which email address are you looking for? How are you looking for it? Where are you looking for it? How come someone looked for it before, didn't find it, and then found it when looking again? If I'm not in the system how is it possible for me to log into the main website?

I also added a couple of screenshots, with explanation, that shows me logging in with the address they claim doesn't exist in their system.

I've had no reply to my questions so far. I've had no reply at all so far.

After posting yesterday's post I did the usual thing of tweeting it and, obviously, mentioned @Virgin_TrainsEC in the tweet.

Good 10 days into the @Virgin_TrainsEC support saga and there’s no end in sight: https://t.co/ZfV0lR4DQL

— Dave Pearson (@davepdotorg) June 27, 2016

This lead to a little exchange on twitter where I mentioned that the main reason I was trying to switch to Virgin's own system, rather than use someone line TheTrainLine, was so that I could get the free WiFi and save myself a tenner each trip.

All credit to Virgin East Coast: they contacted me directly and have provided me with 10 one-use WiFi access codes to keep me going while this gets sorted out. It's not a solution to the problem, but it does remove the extra cost I was trying to get rid of for the next 5 standard class round trips (I sometimes sneak in a first class journey if the price is too good to ignore).

So.... no still no solution, but some welcome help from them to be going on with. Can't grumble at that.

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.

Another update to the saga of trying to get the Virgin East Coast Ticket Wallet app up and running.

Late on yesterday afternoon (a Sunday, it has to be said, so that's some dedication to solving the problem) I got a reply to the email I'd sent them previously. It didn't contain anything in response to what I'd written (so it looks like I'm never going to find out what a TOC is! sadface) but it did say this:

To Dave Pearson,

Thank you for your response.

Please attempt to change your password via the ‘forgotten password’ process.

Once you have amended your password, please attempt to sign into your Virgin Trains East Coast Ticket Wallet App.

I apologise for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

I'll admit that I wasn't convinced by this plan. There was no explanation as to why I'd want to change my password, or why I'd want to pretend that I'd forgotten my password (I hadn't forgotten it, obviously), there wasn't a suggestion that something had been changed or fixed such that this would tickle a solution into working. It appeared to imply that I'd actually forgotten my password and that I should go about setting it again.

Fair enough... I did. It didn't make a jot of difference. Same problem. I've written back to say so.

The actual act of saying I'd forgotten my password was a little odd. I did the obvious thing of going to the main website and saying I wanted to sign in.

Once clicked, that took me to the actual login page, which has the link to say you've forgotten your password.

When you click on that link you get taken to.... a login page!

There you then have to say, again, that you've forgotten your password. Only once you've done that do you get somewhere where you can say you've actually forgotten your password.

Not horrific, of course, but a rather odd route, needing to click pretty much the same link twice to say the same thing.

Anyway, I tried it, it didn't work, they've had an email to say as much. Now I wait for the next step.

This morning I called back on the number I'd been given yesterday evening. I explained briefly why I was calling and how I was returning someone's call but, sadly, ended up back in support script-following hell: they started asking for booking reference and all that stuff again. I stopped them, explained the issue again, and they then started to ask for ticket details and so on.

Deeply frustrating. The problem I had was that I was trying to set everything up so I could even stand a chance of booking a ticket. How could I have a ticket I could tell them about if I'd not even got to that part?

When I made this clear, in as polite but firm way as possible, I was passed onto that person's supervisor.

As luck would have it he was the person who'd called and left a message last night. He quickly filled me in on what was happening, saying they weren't sure what the problem was but that the details had been passed to the tech people. He also asked if he could send me an email with some questions in it that would help get to the bottom of things; he said it would ask things like OS type and version, device type, etc. It all seemed to make sense

I said I'd be happy to and we left it at that.

I've had the email. This is what it asked:

1 - Origin and Destination

Gah! Here we go again. The whole support thing appears to be predicated on the idea that you're having a problem getting somewhere. They seem to not understand that if you can't even use the system in the first place you can't even have booked a ticket.

2 - Date and Time

Without a ticket, there can be no date and time.

3 - Number of passengers and railcards if any

Seeing a pattern here?

4 - Ticket name and price

I... erm... hello?

5 - Browser name & version

Finally! We're getting somewhere! Only... my problem isn't in a web browser. My problem is with logging in with their Android app. I'm sure I mentioned this to them at least once.

6 - Screenshot if possible showing the error

Yay! Finally! We're getting somewhere! I pasted in the screenshot that was included in yesterday's blog post. You know the one. The one where it's just some text that says the username and password are invalid. Because... images are better than the text in them, right?

7 - Name of the TOC

I have no clue what this means. TOC? What the heck is a TOC?

8 - Email address of the user

This I can do! I know this one! (I still suspect that this is the cause of the problem).

9 - Booking ref

Gaaarrrrrggghhhhhh!

10 - Screen shot showing exact error and exact steps to recreate the error

Wait... didn't I get asked that in question 6? How is this screenshot going to be different from the other screenshot? Still, at least it asks for the steps to recreate now. So I answered that:

1. Create a new account on the Virgin East Coast website. Ideally use an email address that contains both a full stop and a plus sign, as mine does. Also ensure that you use a password that is the same length as mine.
2. Log in and look at registered devices.
3. See there are none and follow the links it provides to the applicable app that will result in a device being registered. In this case the Ticket Wallet.
4. Download and install on a suitable Android device.
5. Attempt to log in and, likely, find that you're told that the username and password is incorrect.

So that's all sent off now. Now I wait for another call back at some point in the near future.

Curious how the thing it didn't ask was what app I was using, what version it was, what mobile device it was being used on, what OS, what OS version, etc...