Big UK ISPs Should Make Critical Support Contacts Easier to Find

PlusNet

PlusNet has won a number of awards for customer service and as a result we were keen to see how easy it was to locate their various support contacts. Little wonder that we had no trouble finding their forum and social networking pages. Similarly the ISP has also made phone and postal address contacts easy to find, which is something that other providers still appear keen to hide away in the depths of often overly tedious “help” sections.

On the flip side the ISP doesn’t appear to have a live chat service, at least not one that we could find. It’s possible that this facility may still exist under the members-only pages but we were unable to access that.

SCORES
Forum: 2
Twitter: 2
Live Chat: 0
Facebook: 2
Phone Number: 2
Email: 2
Postal Address: 2

TOTAL: 12

AAISP

Broadly speaking Andrews and Arnold made almost all of its primary support contacts both quick and easy to find, although it took us a little longer to find their Facebook page (noted under their service status section) and we couldn’t locate any sign of a discussion forum (though we know that one did briefly exist a few years ago at http://forum.aaisp.net.uk).

As a side note it should be said that AAISP does offer a few things that other providers do not. For example, they support Facetime video calls from iPhone/iPad devices, SMS, help via a special Newsgroup and even have a page where customers can submit ideas for new services (http://ideas.aa.net.uk). Had we also marked on some of these then they might well have come top, although such features are not widely supported by other providers.

SCORES
Forum: 0
Twitter: 2
Live Chat: 2
Facebook: 1
Phone Number: 2
Email: 2
Postal Address: 2

TOTAL: 11

BT

Generally speaking BT’s website, while somewhat cluttered and potentially confusing for some, did support all of the major communication services for support. But some, such as their BTCare Twitter feed, which is incidentally very well supported, and their Facebook page were harder to find than we expected (in the end they were uncovered by accident via the operators community forum).

Thankfully the primary email and phone contacts were easy to find, as were the operators live chat and forum services. The only real area where BT fell down was with postal contacts, which took an age to find. In the end we found it on their btplc.com pages, which is perhaps not where you’d expect to go for home support.

NOTE: BT will revamp their website in June 2013 and thus these results may lose some relevance.

SCORES
Forum: 2
Twitter: 1
Live Chat: 2
Facebook: 1
Phone Number: 2
Email: 2
Postal Address: 0.5

TOTAL: 10.5

Sky Broadband

Locating Sky’s forum, live chat, email contact and phone numbers proved to be fairly quick and easy. On the other hand you had to be logged in to actually access the email form and the live chat system was listed as unavailable almost every time we tried to use it during the day (perhaps we were all just very unlucky).

Elsewhere Sky had hidden their ‘SkyHelpTeam’ twitter feed someway down their forum page, where it could easily be overlooked, and we had no luck locating their Facebook page without resorting to an external Google search. Likewise it took us a long time to locate their consumer address and when we finally found one it only catered for complaints.

SCORES
Forum: 2
Twitter: 0.5
Live Chat: 2
Facebook: 0.5
Phone Number: 2
Email: 2
Postal Address: 0.5

TOTAL: 9.5

O2

O2 has done an excellent job embracing social networking and we had no trouble finding their Facebook, Twitter, Forum and Live chat pages. Unfortunately the ISP falls down when it comes to more traditional mediums and it took us an age to locate a support number and postal address, the latter of which only appeared to be designed for complaints. Similarly we only found the email contact after following a support forum link to a form on O2’s older support pages via Google. Poor.

As a side note O2 customers are about to be moved over to Sky Broadband and thus a poor score here will soon become irrelevant.

SCORES
Forum: 2
Twitter: 2
Live Chat: 2
Facebook: 2
Phone Number: 0.5
Email: 0.5
Postal Address: 0.5

TOTAL: 9

Virgin Media

We had no problem finding Virgin Media’s forum, phone number and email contacts. But like other ISPs we couldn’t find their Facebook page or Twitter feed mentioned anywhere, although we knew they existed (note: VM’s Twitter feed didn’t appear to provide active support). The postal address was also difficult to pin down and the only one we could find was used for complaints (not necessarily where everybody would think to look first).

Similarly we had no luck finding any Live Chat service, except for the one offered through the ISPs subscription-based Digital Home Support service and that only appeared to be available after a download, which is not ideal. Sadly we only came across this by accident after hunting around some old topics on virgin’s support forum.

SCORES
Forum: 2
Twitter: 0.5
Live Chat: 0.5
Facebook: 0.5
Phone Number: 2
Email: 2
Postal Address: 0.5

TOTAL: 8

END.

*Note – websites are always changing and so, as time moves on, the above results may not always remain relevant.

In the future we may return to this and look at other areas, such as whether or not the ISP provides easy access to an adequate Service Status feed (i.e. one that is kept up-to-date and easy to find) or offers assistance via SMS, Facetime calls or an active Newsgroup; though Usenet has been phased out by more than a few ISPs.

We would have liked to test more ISPs but it was important to keep the workload manageable and so we opted for a selection of big providers and some of the better known smaller ones.