UPDATE UK ISP EE Hit by Ofcom for Most Home Broadband Complaints

Mobile and Internet provider EE UK (Orange) has once again been shamed by Ofcom’s latest quarterly customer complaints report (Q1-2013), which highlighted their home broadband service as having the largest number of disgruntled customers among all of the biggest ISPs. But they did improve from Q4-2012.

The study, which only looked at telecoms firms with a market share of greater than 4%, reported that EE received an average of 0.57 complaints per 1000 customers for their fixed line broadband service in Q1-2013 (down from a score of 0.70 in Q4-2012).

Complaints were said to be “mainly driven by difficulties in changing [ISP] and service issues“. But some of EE’s specific gripes were also likely to be fuelled following the aftermath of last year’s move to end their “free broadband for life” offer (here).

As usual the best broadband ISPs with the fewest complaints continued to be Sky Broadband and Virgin Media, which have consistently remained below the industry average (level of complaints).

Claudio Pollack, Director of Ofcoms Consumer Group, said:

“It’s important that providers continue to work to improve their performance. We’re committed to providing consumers with valuable information to help them choose a provider that best suits their needs. Consumer complaints also help us to identify where to target any necessary enforcement action and ensure that providers comply with our rules.”

The study also reports complaints against landline telephone providers, mobile operators and Pay TV services. Sadly TalkTalk still comes out as the worst for landline telephone services and saw more problems in the first quarter than at the end of last year.

A TalkTalk spokesperson said:

“We’ve made significant improvements across the business over the last year and we’re pleased this continues to be reflected in the Ofcom data. Complaints about both landline and broadband services have substantially reduced and are almost half compared to the same quarter last year.

We’ve invested in our online customer support and over 70% of customer service contacts now take place online. When issues do arise we fix them first time in approaching three quarters of cases. We continue to look for ways to better serve our customers and make further improvements in our service, whilst continuing to provide the great value we’re known for.”

Overall TalkTalk’s phone service attracted 0.39 complaints per 1,000 customers (up from 0.36 in Q4-2012). By comparison Sky Broadband and Virgin Media were the best.

Meanwhile T-Mobile and Orange (EE) seemed to do the worst for mobile phone services and BT managed to attract the most complaints by far for its BTVision and YouView based IPTV (Pay TV) services.

Ofcoms Complaints Report – Q1-2013
http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/2013/06/latest-telecoms-and-pay-tv-complaints-figures-revealed-2/

UPDATE 11:53am

Added a comment from TalkTalk above.