Sky Broadband and Virgin Media Come Top in Ofcom Satisfaction Study

The UK telecoms regulatory has today published a new study of consumer satisfaction with fixed line broadband, phone, pay TV and mobile providers, which surveyed thousands of consumers between July and September 2015 to reveal that Sky Broadband is the highest rated of all the big ISPs.

Overall Ofcom’s survey, which was prepared by Saville Rossiter-Base, involved 4,078 face-to-face interviews and an online survey with between 1,000 and 1,600 customer service experiences targeted per sector. Take note that most of this was conducted before last year’s cyber-attack on TalkTalk’s website, which compromised the personal details for a large number of subscribers.

Naturally our main focus will be on the fixed line broadband and phone side, although we’ll also include some data for mobile and pay TV providers. Sadly the survey only focused on the very largest providers, thus we don’t get to see how the smaller and often better quality ISPs compare.

The results reveal that customer service satisfaction in the landline (phone) sector increased slightly from 67% in 2014 to 70% in 2015, while satisfaction with fixed line broadband services fell from 69% to 67% over the same period. Elsewhere satisfaction with mobile providers fell slightly from 73% to 72%, while satisfaction with pay TV services also dropped from 80% to 76%.

Generally speaking Sky Broadband and Virgin Media were rated the highest for both broadband and phone services, while TalkTalk were the lowest rated and BT tended to hover around the industry average.

Broadly speaking, most consumers only contacted their broadband ISP when they had a fault/repair related issue (those accounted for around 42-55% of contacts); TalkTalk is responsible for the highest 55% figure in that range, although elsewhere only 15% of customers contacted TalkTalk about billing related issues (the lowest level of all the providers).

The most common reason for customers who contacted their broadband provider about a fault/repair related issue was because their Internet connection speed is too slow (19%), which won’t surprise anybody.

Sadly, when it came to Pay TV services, the study only looked at Sky and Virgin Media. Related customer satisfaction for Pay TV services fell from 72% to 69% at Sky, while at Virgin Media we saw it increase from 58% to 62%.

Thankfully the survey included all of the major Mobile Network Operators (MNO), which interestingly saw O2 come out on top with 80% satisfaction and EE was rated the lowest on 66%. Readers may recall that EE had a bumpy 2015, thanks in no small part to their exploding Power Bars, a failure to comply with the rules for complaints handling and various other hiccups.

The full study, which can be downloaded below, also examined aspects of the providers’ customer service, such as the speed with which issues were addressed, the standard of advice given and the attitude and ability of the advisor.

Quality of Customer Service Report 2015
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/other/cross-media/quality-of-customer-service-annual-reports/2015/