Which? Hammers Biggest UK Broadband ISPs in Satisfaction Survey

The latest biannual survey of consumer satisfaction from consumer magazine Which? has criticised UK ISPs BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Vodafone for continuing to come bottom of their table. Meanwhile Zen Internet was praised for “comfortably taking top spot in our rankings.“

The survey itself was based on feedback from 8,063 paying Which? members, which was conducted during January 2019. The survey asked respondents to rate their experiences across a variety of different categories such as customer service, value for money, connection speed, technical support and reliability.

Unfortunately the magazine’s public press release doesn’t share a full summary of the results and only reveals how the largest broadband providers faired (i.e. not very well). However Zen Internet has separately informed us that, as per usual, they came top of the survey with an overall satisfaction score of 87% (up 1% point on the previous survey). We note that 451 survey respondents were Zen customers.

Overall Zen managed to score top marks (5 stars out of 5) for almost all of the categories, except ‘Value for Money’ and ‘Speed’ where they secured 4 stars. By comparison Talk Talk and Sky both found themselves right at the bottom of the table with a tied satisfaction score of just 50%. Below we’ve included the H2 2018 results (bracketed) to show how things have changed.

Biggest UK ISPs by Customer Satisfaction H1 2019 (H2 2018 Result)

Vodafone 58% (62%)

Generally said to have “returned mediocre ratings across the board” and was also recently named the most complained-about broadband provider between July and September of 2018 by Ofcom.

Virgin Media 58% (59%)

Some 54% of VM customers complained about price increases, while 17% said they’ve been left without a connection for hours or days at a time (17%), or have had problems with their router (21%).

BT 51% (49%)

Customers were particularly unimpressed by the value for money they were getting (BT’s isn’t known for being the cheapest but they do provide a lot of extras, such as Public WiFi and Cloud storage etc.). It’s also noted that 20% of customers experienced problems with very slow speeds and 20% also experienced connection dropouts.

Sky Broadband 50% (47%)

Some 67% of those surveyed said they were likely to switch away from Sky and 22% said they had experienced issues with very slow connection speeds.

TalkTalk 50% (48%)

The ISP was panned for the quality of its customer service and tech support. Related customers were the most likely to suffer from very slow speeds (27%) and frequent connection dropouts (21%) in the last 12 months.

The good news is that the bottom three providers have actually improved their performance slightly since the last survey, while Vodafone and Virgin Media sadly saw a small reduction in their satisfaction rating. The Vodafone result doesn’t surprise us since the provider has been steadily falling in other quality surveys and Ofcom recently named them as the most complained about broadband and phone provider (here).

However it’s worth noting that other surveys tend to rank Sky Broadband and Virgin Media much highe. Ofcom similarly reports that they both tend to receive below the industry average level of consumer complaints (fewer complaints is a good thing).

As usual it’s worth taking the results of such surveys with a pinch of salt. The sample was probably too small to cover the entire market and so we only get a partial reflection.