Ofcom UK Satisfaction Survey Puts TalkTalk Bottom for Broadband

The latest survey of consumer satisfaction, which was conducted by the communications regulator with 6,000 respondents between July and September 2013, has found that Sky Broadband and Virgin Media both score the highest (71%) for broadband but TalkTalk is at the bottom on 62%.

The study, which sadly only looked at the markets largest 4 – 6 providers (i.e. not a proper reflection of the entire market) and also included Pay TV and telephone operators, found that the level of overall satisfaction had increased over the past three years but some familiar problems remain.

For example, broadband speed remains the main reason for customers to contact their ISPs customer service department (16% of contacts) and this is followed by issues related to switching provider or package (12%).

Claudio Pollack, Ofcoms Consumer Group Director, said:

“We expect communications providers to deliver high standards of service to their customers. In the event things go wrong, it is important that consumers have peace of mind that their questions or issues will be dealt with in a timely and efficient way by their provider.

Our research data gives consumers valuable information about standards of customer service, which can help them when choosing a new service or provider. We also hope this research acts as an incentive to providers to continue to work to improve their customer service and we will be discussing our findings with them.”

It’s noted that Virgin Media did particularly well for both phone and broadband satisfaction, which is thanks to several reasons including how it logs query details to avoid consumers having to repeat themselves and general politeness. It was also the only provider to score higher than average on ease of getting through to the right person (67% versus 58% average).

But we suspect that some ISPs, such as Zen Internet, AAISP and a few others, would have scored well above the big boys had they produced enough data to compete.

Overall satisfaction with customer service by fixed broadband provider

Overall satisfaction with customer service by landline provider

Overall satisfaction with customer service by mobile provider

Overall satisfaction with customer service by pay TV provider

The full report naturally contains a lot more detail and can be downloaded below.

Ofcoms Customer Service Satisfaction Survey (PDF)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/../Quality_of_service_report.pdf