Sky Broadband Tops Ofcom Study of UK ISP Customer Service Satisfaction
The UK communications regulator, Ofcom, has today published its latest study of customer service satisfaction among the biggest telecoms operators and revealed that Sky Broadband (BSkyB) comes top for both its fixed line broadband, TV and phone services, while O2 was rated the best for mobile providers.
Overall satisfaction with customer service remained lowest in the fixed broadband ISP market (62%), although this still represents an improvement over the 58% recorded at the same time last year. Elsewhere overall landline phone satisfaction stood at 64% (up from 61% in 2011), while mobile had 67% (down from 69% in 2011) and pay TV 69% (up from 68% in 2011).
Claudio Pollack, Ofcoms Consumer Group Director, said:
“It’s encouraging to see a degree of improvement in certain areas of customer service in the communications sectors. Ofcom hopes that this research will both incentivise providers to improve all aspects of their customer service and give consumers valuable information about the standards of customer service they can expect when choosing a provider.”
The research also claims to have seen particular progress in the ease and speed of contacting customer services in the mobile, broadband and landline phone markets during this period, yet many problem areas remain. For example, the most common reason for contact with a broadband ISP remained slow connection speed (17%), followed by changing package or service (12%).
NOTE: The following graphs represent “overall” satisfaction and not merely satisfaction with “customer service” as above, in this one Virgin Media comes top ahead of Sky Broadband for internet access.
We haven’t included the Pay TV graph above because Ofcom currently only rates Virgin Media and BSkyB (Sky Broadband), which obviously excludes the BTVision service and recent TV launches from TalkTalk etc. Generally speaking Sky came top for customer service (71%) and Virgin followed on 66%.
Ofcoms November 2012 Customer Satisfaction Study (PDF)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/…/telecoms-research/customer-satisfaction.pdf
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he is also the founder of ISPreview since 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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This is an interesting article indeed, however I find it disappointing that they failed to add other telecoms companies such as Plus-net and Telecomplus who are getting better consumer feed-back from the independent magazine “Which” who show BT, Talk Talk and Sky to be providing poor services and value for money to their customers.
Ofcom is meant to be a champion of the telecoms industry however it appears to be bias in this article. How can they make these claims about the top three when they have all increased their customers line rental and Sky have done this twice in three months. In fact if people look at the poor share prices of these companies that will give you a better picture.
Check out Telecomplus who trade under the ticker TP they have had the best performing share of all the above, so they must be doing something right. If Ofcom want to provide both business and consumers with the right information they should include all telecoms companies trading or providing services. Then the consumer can judge for them selves.