Ofcom Reports Sharp Rise in EE Home Broadband Complaints for Q1 2014

Ofcom’s quarterly consumer complaints report for Q1 2014 reveals that gripes about “service faults, billing and issues with changing provider” have triggered a sudden surge in complaints against EE’s fixed line home broadband packages, which means they’ve overtaken BT to become the most complained about of all the largest ISPs. Meanwhile TalkTalk continued to be the worst for fixed phone lines.

Overall EE’s home broadband service generated 0.42 complaints per 1,000 customers, which represents a sharp rise from a score of just 0.29 at the end of last year. However it’s important to stress that Ofcom’s report only includes a handful of the biggest providers (i.e. those that hold a market share of greater than 4%) and is not a gauge for the whole market.

By comparison most of EE rivals saw no significant change over the previous quarter and instead held broadly steady at around their existing levels, with Virgin Media and Sky Broadband continuing to receive the lowest level of complaints (proportionally).

Tom Mockridge, Virgin Media’s CEO, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Whilst it is great to see customers have told Ofcom we are better than BT, Sky and TalkTalk, there is always room for improvement. We believe we can do even more and are working hard to deliver the best customer experience every time.”

Meanwhile TalkTalk continued to generate the most complaints of all the big fixed line phone providers (0.28 complaints per 1,000 customers), which is up ever so slightly from 0.27 at the end of last year. Broadly most of the operators held fairly steady but there was a very slight overall increase in complaint volumes.

As for mobile operators, general complaint volumes remained fairly low but once again EE did poorly (0.12 complaints per 1,000 customers), which Ofcom again describing them as being “twice the industry average and largely driven by issues related to complaints handling, billing and issues with changing provider.” However it should be noted that Ofcom now aggregates complaints from Orange and T-Mobile into EE’s score.

On the Pay TV front it’s little surprise to find that BT TV still grabs most of the complaints (0.25 per 1,000 subscribers), with TalkTalk TV not far behind (0.19 per 1,000 subscribers). But BT’s complaint levels have continued to fall (from 0.31 at the end of last year), while the rest held stable.

Ofcoms Complaints Report Q1 2014
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/…/Q1-2014.pdf