Ofcom Publish 2014 Broadband, Phone, Mobile and TV Complaints Report

The communications regulator has today published their latest quarterly consumer complaints report to the end of 2014 and unsurprisingly, despite a general flatness in complaint volumes, there are still some familiar names topping the tables. We’re looking at you EE (fixed broadband and phone), Vodafone (mobile) and BT (Pay TV).

Ofcom’s report tends to focus on just a handful of the markets largest providers, specifically those that hold a market share of +4%. At least they use to because the eagle eyed among you will have noticed that it’s been almost a year since Ofcom published their last summary of complaints for Q1 2014 (here), which the regulator tells us is because they’ve been busy revising their methodology.

In particular the threshold for inclusion has been adjusted to include operators with a customer market share of at least 1.5%, which means that today’s report covers more providers and summarises the last three quarters of data (Q2, Q3 and Q4 2014).

As such today’s report notes that EE, Plusnet and the Post Office are now included in landline phone complaints. In addition, Plusnet is included in broadband, while Talk Mobile and Tesco Mobile are included in the pay-monthly mobile figures.

The Results

Generally speaking the overall volume of complaints has come down a little in some areas, largely thanks to the “name and shame” approach of reports like this one. But on the broadband front it was sadly no surprise to find that EE continued to attract the most consumer gripes, generating 0.42 complaints per 1,000 customers by the end of 2014.

By comparison Virgin Media and Sky Broadband happily continued to attract the lowest volume of complaints of all the big providers, much as they have done for many prior quarters.

Sadly EE also attracted the most complaints for fixed line phone services, topping the table with a score of 0.33 per 1,000 customers in Q4 2014. Meanwhile Sky Broadband and Virgin Media both managed to walk away looking fairly unscathed, having finished the year with the lowest level of complaints.

Interestingly the results for mobile operators have seen some change, with EE being overtaken as the most complained about operator by Vodafone (0.15 complaints per 1000 customers in Q4 2014).

Finally, the Pay TV market appears to have shown most improvement, with all operators reporting a steady fall in consumer complaints. Never the less BT and TalkTalk still top the table and by a fairly noticeable margin.

Ofcom’s Complaints Report Q4 2014
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/../complaints/Q4-2014/