I’m the first to rant about crap customer service, as my colleagues and friends will testify. First Great Western is a frequent target of my wrath, for example. However, I also try to recognise good customer service when I experience it.

My Dad has been an NTL cable TV and broadband customer for years; in fact, he had a dial-up connection initially. The company has since been taken over by Virgin Media. Historically, he’s been reasonably happy with the service - but, over the past few months, the connection speed has been deteriorating. When I did Broadband Choices and Think Broadband speed tests recently, I noticed that he was getting only 124Kbps. That’s pretty terrible, even when you take into account contention rates and distance from the exchange - especially given that he’s paying for “up to” 4Mbps.

On my advice, he called Virgin and an engineer was sent out to him within a few days. The engineer fiddled about with some of his browser settings, but the problem didn’t go away. He rang Virgin again and another engineer was dispatched with a modem to replace the antiquated NTL one he had. This appears to have solved the problem, and he’s now getting 3.4Mbps and is going to be upgraded (free of charge) to an 8Mbps connection in the near future. You can’t argue with that.

Jo Jamieson