Virgin Money - how far can you outsource before you become irrelevant?

Does this business actually exist or is it just a bunch of outsourced services strung together by a non-existence "Head Office". There's rational, cost effective Outsourcing and then there is Virgin. If you call the Virgin Money Card call centre number (which you really have to hunt for, it's not listed on the www.virginmoney.co.za website, you'll get through to an ABSA call centre, who will insist they ARE Virgin Card "Head Office" - unless you ask "if I drove there now there would be a Virgin sign outside?" - then no, they are not Virgin Money Head office. If you ask for a Virgin Money Head office they will give you a ********** number (also available on the website) which does not exist. They say they only ever communicate with "Virgin Money Head Office" via one e-mail address- ********** and no one ever speaks to anyone at "Virgin". The insurance division is about the same thing.

The directors seem spread out about the country without any working contact details so really, all "Virgin Money" is is a website, with pretty pictures of a "team" that are unreachable, that never interact with their "outsourced" call centres.

I tracked down one of their Directors on Twitter to ask him for an operational Virgin Money Head office contact detail since the one on the website gets a "this number does not exist" automated response - and his response was to send me back to the website with no card division contact details and the non-existent telephone number.

Richard Branson's focus on his staff to the exclusion of all else seems to have resulted in no staff at all! Or there may as well not be as there is no available contact detail for any of them! Cushy job, ride the wave of the Virgin brand, outsource all the work to other people and somehow they still exist - even with their despicable error-ridden websites and complete lack of customer service.

The bright shinny well-rated repo-linked product at the other end just is not worth the effort - especially as if anything goes wrong, you will be abandoned in the desert of arrogant banking call-centre mentality-based people. The shiny Virgin brand is just smoke and mirrors on this product since there really aren't any "Virgin" people involved with it at all - and whoever they've outsourced their website maintenance and functionality to needs to go back to school!

We've just concluded a 4-week process with them of website errors, promised phone-calls that were never received and one attitude-laden call from a woman supposedly calling to deal with the complaint I eventually had to send via Virgin Head office in the UK since theirs were the only contact details available.

And at the end of it all, the application was declined anyway (for someone with a close to 7-figure annual salary who has just returned to SA and has no debt and minimal expenses) since he doesn't have a high enough credit rating! Hahaha! Why? Because that's what the computer says.

So "Virgin Money" is a shiny empty box that outsources - there is no individual or group of individuals reflected through Virgin Money because it's an automaton. No human being outside of a banking or insurance call-centre with all the joy they are to deal with is ever going to have anything to do with any "clients" - because there are no "people" to speak of.

So in summation this has been a real study in : How far can you take outsourcing until you disappear? and How much should an organisation coddle their employees (in this case by making them un-contactable faces on a dysfunctional website at the end of non-existent telephone numbers with no work to do since everything is outsourced) before the "customer" becomes irrelevant and they disappear into their own B-hinds?

And the answer to the second : Pretty long it seems - if you're riding the wave of the shiny "Virgin" brand and since they still exist despite delivering the very worst online application process in history!

Even if you're a die-hard brand-bunny, give this one a miss! Sincerely! Go find a shiny other brand that has some contactable human beings in the mix somewhere - preferably higher than the level of "outsourced call centre agent". This product is a shiny box with nothing in it but mirrors deflecting you to other people - for goodness sake - THEIR HEAD OFFICE NUMBER DOES NOT EVEN EXIST!!!

If this is the status Quo of the Virgin Operations worldwide, then this is an implosion waiting to happen - no organisation can climb so far up its own B-hind without collapsing into the weight of the vacuum created by hanging a shinny sign over a black hole.