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EE UK Attempts to Reverse Poor Broadband Customer Service Record

Tuesday, Sep 15th, 2015 (7:53 am) - Score 1,121

Telecoms giant EE has announced that it is to introduce a new “Broadband Service First” pledge, which will form part of a fresh commitment to move away from the bad old days and their sometimes shaky history of customer service. Now to set aside that feeling of déjà vu from the old Orange days.

So far 2015 hasn’t exactly given EE the best of good press. Between exploding PowerBar chargers (here) and a £1 million fine from Ofcom for breaking the regulator’s customer complaint handling rules (here), EE was in Q1 2015 also named as the operator that attracted the most complaints for home broadband and phone services (here).

But now EE appears to be taking a leaf out of TalkTalk’s book (they’ve also been in a similar sort of position before and have improved a fair bit) by owning up to their mistakes and pledging to do better, not least by aiming to become the number one for service in the telecoms sector.

Francoise Clemes, EE’s Chief Customer Service Officer, said:

We’ve laid the groundwork to greatly improve Service for our mobile customers and we’re already seeing the results. In the last year alone complaints about mobile received by Ofcom have dropped by 50%.

There’s still more work to do but I’m proud of this record. Our Broadband Service however continues to fall short of what our customers expect and deserve – but I want to reassure them we’re addressing this as a priority. As well as opening a Broadband Operations Hub and bringing in a new team, crucially we are introducing integrated systems so that we can align processes between mobile and broadband.

I’m not going to offer any excuses because broadband customer service has simply not been good enough. I promise all of our customers that Service is our top priority and, through Broadband Service First, we will fix this.”

Precisely how EE plans to achieve all this isn’t completely clear, although they are aiming to hire 500 extra customer service staff in order to support their broadband subscribers via a dedicated hotline and Ofcom are also known to be keeping close tabs on EE’s performance. General support system improvements may also help, such as the newly mooted “digital and social media Service tools” for customers.

 

At the end of the day it’s a tall order to expect that EE will deliver on their goal of becoming the best for customer service (the best quality usually comes from smaller providers), but in fairness you don’t have to be the best in this market to be better than the rest.. you just have to be reasonably good.

At the last count EE had 919,000 home broadband customers (Q2 2015) and that’s a strong improvement over the 775,000 that was reported one year earlier, which is largely thanks to a combination of special offers and appealing to a wider customer base than merely their existing mobile subscribers (Vodafone take note).

Never the less EE needs to do better, lest they risk slipping back into the land of aggressive churn. Hopefully this is the start of something good.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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