Dear virgin

some suggested enhancement to the sim replacement feature :

there are many scenarios in which someone might need a sim card replacing.

1: Theft of phone : in this situation termination of the old sim is ideally immediate.

2: loss of or non functioning sim : in this situation termination of the old sim is also ideally immediate.

3: but there is also a third scenario, which is that say someone has been a customer since the days of GSM and there sim is 12 years old.

and they would like a new replacement sim to be sure they are 100% compatible with 3G services etc, or theyre old sim is temporamental but still functioning ?

My experience

I am a person who is in the small but relevant quantity of customers who are in scenario 3 above, in which my sim was 12/14 years old( a long registered customer of virgin) and i needed a replacement sim which was 3G savvy to work in a modern phone which had 3G ? I made the mistake of phoning up and asking for a replacement sim to be sent so that i could make it work 100% perfectly with a very modern phone, the customer operative : whether theyre are an outsourced or working in an inhouse call centre or even working to a computer script, did not as should be procedure, to inform me my old sim would be de-activated before my new sim had turned up or not ?!?!? In this new british age it is important that negatives whether detrimental to brand/image are elucidated clearly to the rational minds of customers, as only presenting positives to them in some endless glossy self love corporate marketing spin, does not wash with the modern savvy customer, things need to be changed endlessly for the good and for the better, degredation is not acceptable, everything is in a process of refinement science, nature, customer service, humanity etc. If I had known about this donwtime I probably would have found a different way to sort this out ? or massivley reconsidered as downtime to me in the region of 4 days, without my own consent or comprehension in advance is unnacceptable from a modern customer service perspective ?

how scenario 3 would work in the ideal :

now in this scenario the customer does not need nor require or would benefit from immediate termination of the old sim before the new sim has arrived, as they may well be using that number to conduct everyday business. In this scenario it would be a better system to send the customer a new sim which is not activated ( therefore the old sim can continue to function before the new sim turns up and then once they have called to activate the new sim, then they continue to use the old sim until the old sim stops functioning and then swapover to the new sim which by this point should be immediately active, in this scenario there is minimal downtime of the mobile number itself being usable, which is ideal for the customer, even if I had posession of both sims then even if there was overlap of functioning that would be better for me than the number not being active for nay number of days in this scenario ?

as a person who supports does tech support for a living, when Im switching from a server on which someones email account is active to a new server, downtime can dovetail so well that downtime maybe 20mins if not none and no lost emails, you might say that sim activation and de-activation takes more time to percolate through the various mobile systems but there is no real reason for this to be the case ? dependant of course on the quality and speed of communication between those systems ?

if you could revise your operating procedure to take account of scenario 3, I would perceive it be an improvement, in the long line improvement the at represents the tally of whether a business is stagnating or thriving.

general corporate issues :

I also think it important in terms of relation to customers such as myself who though payasyougo for so long, and spending often as much as being on a reasonable contract that you should flexibly treat your customers on an equal footing dependant only on theyre monthly spend, regardless of on contract or not, and not pursue chase and offer better services to those who threaten to leave or are more self involved and demanding, often the quiet customer is equally deserving but does not genuinely have the time to pursue theyre own benefit on every front, and a good company should be aware of this, and as such be working on their customers behalf to revise or improve automatically the value proposition of your offering to them, to keep them in line with the more vocal and self serving customers, and this would be some evidence of a corporate belief in equality and justice to all customers. In the same way that to some extent that as usage increase on say an oyster card the customers daily use is converted into its best possible value for them from a billing perspective, ie maximum usage cost being the days travelcard costs, and this should be done automatically and without demand on the customers part for all services. whereas in reality corporate often rely on the dormency and no proactivity of the consumer, to enable more profits to be generatedbe delivering less value to those cstuomers.

thank you a virgin customer.