Smaller UK Broadband ISPs Faster to Pick-up the Phone – Big Ones Slow

A new study has phoned some of the United Kingdom’s biggest and smallest broadband ISPs in order to work out how quick their call answer times were. The results reveal that the big boys (e.g. PlusNet and KC [Hull only] etc.) are among the slowest, while smaller providers tend to be the fastest (e.g. Exa Networks and B4RN etc.).

We’ve looked at the issues of customer support quality in the past with our examination of how easy it is to locate customer service contacts (here) and an earlier test of email support performance (here), but not many studies have been done of telephone support performance; at least not outside of Ofcom’s mystery shopper tests with the biggest ISPs.

But a new report has attempted to uncover how quickly both the largest and smallest ISPs answer the phone and it reveals that smaller providers, such as Exa Networks with an average call wait time of 9.83 seconds and the community B4RN project with exactly 10 seconds, were easily the quickest to put you through to a real human.

By comparison and in a perhaps somewhat surprising twist, given their strong performance in other studies, PlusNet actually came bottom of the pile by forcing customers to wait for an average of 988.57 seconds (16.48 minutes)! It’s interesting to note that PlusNet are also one of the few big providers to offer UK based support, which they share in common with many of the smallest (Sky has a fair bit of UK support too).

NOTE: Automated answering systems, which are common among the big boys, don’t count as an answer and often only serve to lengthen the wait.

Average Call Waiting Times for UK Internet Providers (seconds)
Exa Networks – 9.83
B4RN – 10
FastNet – 17.16
Daisy – 17.66
Timico – 26.66
Gigaclear – 32.5
Andrews and Arnold (AAISP) – 36.66
Easynet – 39.16
Fidonet – 43
Claranet Soho – 58.66
Gamma – 65.66
Zen Internet – 73.33
Gradwell – 89.66
TalkTalk – 95.75
Hyperoptic – 103.16
Manx Telecom – 123.83
Virgin Media – 142
BT – 170.85
JT – 186.33
Eclipse Internet – 261
Fuel Broadband – 273
Sky Broadband – 330.75
KC – 381.16
Plusnet – 988.57

Overall the BROADBANDRating report found that the average call answer time for small ISPs was 84.76 seconds versus 320.85 for the biggest five (PlusNet’s score brings them all down), although it should be said that the list of tested providers doesn’t represent the entire market and hasn’t separated between business and consumer services (the two often have different requirements and thus performance). Likewise there’s no mention of call cost, since many providers charge for such calls and others do not.

Similarly it would have helped to know when the study was conducted (over what period), how many calls were made to each ISP and at what time of day the calls were placed. Gauging the true quality is only possible by making a good quantity of calls across a long period of time and without this information we don’t know how solid the data is.

Never the less it’s an interesting piece of research, although the good news is that the wait time for most is still below 5 minutes and that’s not terrible.. so long as it’s a free call. But remember that the time it takes to answer a call is only part of the battle, especially if the staff are difficult to understand or only capable of reading from a very basic script.