Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile and Giffgaff Praised for UK Customer Satisfaction
The Institute of Customer Service (ICS) has just published their latest biannual UK Customer Satisfaction Index (July 2023), which finds that Tesco Mobile (ranked 7th), Sky Mobile (ranked 16th) and giffgaff (ranked 34th) were the only telecommunications providers to make their table of the top 50 organisations.
The research reflects the results from a large online survey of around 10,000 consumers – balanced to be representative of the UK adult population, which asked each of them about their experiences of 275 different organisations (a total of 52,000 responses were gathered). This was then used to produce a score out of 100 for each organisation.
Overall, the “Telecommunications & Media” sector reported a fall in its general ranking from 76.6 in July 2022 to 75.4 out of 100 today. However, while Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile and giffgaff were the only telecoms (mobile) operators to make it into the top 50 table, it is worth noting that broadband ISP Plusnet was still named as one of the “most improved” organisations on 77.1 (up from 73.4 last year).
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We should all that all three of the aforementioned Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) are powered by O2’s (VMO2) national network.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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GiffGaff I’ve always heard good things about, but very surprised Sky & Tesco are up there
Sky have always performed well in Ofcom complaints analysis, and Tesco Mobile do have a good reputation (or perhaps less bad, I’m sure they’ve got their own issues).
Curious that all three are using O2’s network. Wonder what the chances of that were?
@Andrew G I noticed that too, could well be a coincidence, but not a good look for O2 regardless
I suppose when your target client base is people who are relatively easy to please, it’s not difficult to come high up in customer satisfaction surveys!
I’m more interested in what on earth UK Power Networks are doing on that table…..the last time I had the misfortune of having to interact with them, they were worse than useless!
1,000% agree with this. Here in NI, we have 5 or 6 choices and every single one of them are beyond useless. I asked Electric Ireland for example a very basic question. What is my current rate (the welcome letter they sent said that their prices were going up 30% or something!). Impossible to get through to them on a phone. I messaged them and it took them over SIX MONTHS to reply. Honestly that is just totally unacceptable. These energy companies are the biggest consumer scam of all.
UK Power Networks are not even an electricity supplier – they only provide the infrastructure.
Presumably they come so high up on this list because they’re only real job for consumers is to fix broken power supply infrastructure. Of course, the only ever ask the person who’s power was off to fill in a satisfaction survey – not the people who had to put up with them working right outside their window and blocking access to their property for a full week!
@AndyK, that’s exactly how it works. Many companies put in satisfaction monitoring like the commonly used Net Promoter Score system. But managers soon work out how to manage the results, and even front line staff do. As a CS agent you’ll not ask somebody to take the survey if they’re angry or the encounters has been winded or challenging, and they’ll often invite customers to take a survey if the agent thinks everything went well. You can see this in action if you read Virgin Media’s Trustpilot reviews – most of the positive ones are “invited” and involve some trivial customer experience that would be hard to mess up like a minor upgrade or a new sale, the overwhelming number of bad ones are “organic” and show frustrated and angry customers with nowhere else to vent.
“When your target base are easy to please”
Wow, do you think they have an algorithm that allows them to detect and market such people? That’ll be worth an absolute fortune
““When your target base are easy to please”…Wow, do you think they have an algorithm that allows them to detect and market such people? That’ll be worth an absolute fortune”
Except that marketing segmentation is already considerably more advanced than perhaps you think? Segmentation models are based on decades of practical evidence and millions of customer interactions, and the big companies have a very clear understanding of who makes them the most money. And that’s quite often what might be seen as the bottom end of the market.
@John exactly as anonymous says – it’s very easy to target customer groups that are generally easier to please. Not very expensive either. And very often that’s done by offering some trivial concept of value – I.e. either be cheap or appear to be cheap…of course, some companies do actually care, and want to offer a better product to people who appreciate it. Long term, that’s usually a much more profitable model if you can do it well. Just simple marketing and knowing what your customer is and what your product is.
How on Earth are 3 providers who all use the O2 network in this list? All I ever see on social media and forums is about how slow / non-existent mobile data on O2 is!
Because they target people who are easy to please – big generalisations and there’ll be some exceptions, but – Giffgaff target young people, who tend not to bother complaining and people who don’t want long contracts, who’ll just leave. Sky Mobile presumably are there because they’re primarily just a cheap addition to existing Sky customers. Tesco Mobile customers are most likely not going to be heavy enough users to care that O2 is a terrible network – they’re just happy to get Clubcard points and a discount.
Ultimately, when you trade on being cheap, people tend not to care about quality of service, so you’re always going to attract “satisfied” customers because they’re happy because it’s cheap and don’t care that there are better quality alternatives.
Most people I know IRL are On O2 even though speeds are dire when there you can’t get carrier aggression.
To be honest – I’m on giffgaff for 10 years… Never had any issues… 5g speeds are totally fine… And in most areas the coverage of all MNOs is basically identical because they all use the same masts…
At least in Leeds o2 is often better than EE… Don’t have a reason to switch… Giffgaff always works and offers roaming…
If anything I’d use vodafone in Leeds, three have 5G but coverage within the trinity centre doesn’t exist whereas Vodafone has as DAS installed – and then also half decent speeds and 4G Voice compared to O2
Giffgaff customers need reminding it’s 2023 and they should have services like VoLTE, visual voicemail and WiFi calling included in their package, inline with most other suppliers.
Except that giffgaff prices are lowish and margins similarly low. Just as BT are “cheapening” the Plusnet offer, so VMO2 want to keep the giffgaff service sufficiently down-market to the usually premium priced O2 offers.
From a commercial perspective, why would you give away near enough a full fat service for less money, even if the actual cost of providing economy and premium services was near enough the same? Other sectors have done this for years – in some cases economy offerings actually cost a little bit more to provide than the rest of a range due to lower standardisation, but it’s important to the provider to offer a product at all relevant price points without cannibalising their own sales. This applies as much to manufacturers as services, and for big companies they’ll all have sophisticated pricing models that work this out, including “we need a product at £x, but it needs to be in some way more limited so that we get the volume sales, but most people willing to pay for our pricier options won’t choose it”. If you buy a low trim car these days, it’ll often have things actually built in in hardware but disabled in software. My car has a nearside foglight, built on, lens, reflector, electrical connections and a bulb, but it doesn’t work because the car ECU has it disabled (although if the filament were to break, I’d need to replace the bulb to shut down the failed bulb alert!). And so it is with services.
VoLTE and wifi calling are not extravagant features though Andrew. They’re very much basic, and increasingly so as 3G (and eventually 2G) are shut down. Once 3G goes and without VoLTE, you’ll have poorer quality calls and can’t use data at the same time as being on a call.
among “cheap” peers, Voxi and Smarty both support it, as does BT Mobile and 1p mobile (though not Plusnet, which is on its way out anyway). O2 doesn’t even support it on their full priced PAYG, but EE, Vodafone and 3 do.
In the car analogy, it’d be like making a car without any radio or internal lights at all. You can, but you probably shouldn’t.
forgot to mention that it’s also better from a network efficiency perspective. 4G is where the coverage and investment has gone, you want people to stay on it. Can’t do that without VoLTE as it’ll drop to 3G (and soon 2G) as soon as a call comes in. If the phone is using wifi calling, even better, as no radio resources are being used.
I take your point they aren’t extravagant, and will increasingly be a necessity, but my point still stands that the lack of these capabilities is not an oversight or mistake, it is an intentional decision to try and reduce what the parent group would see as revenue loss.
In the case of giffgaff, O2 made sure that didn’t launch with all these in the first place. Over time they’ll have to add some things in like VOLTE, so in the meanwhile they’ll be thinking how they can ensure that giffgaff with VOLTE still appeals to a core cheapskate market who (absent the giffgaff product) wouldn’t be users of the O2 network, whilst still ensuring that O2 users are happy to stick with O2 and its higher prices. This can be tricky as BT found with Plusnet, whose offer is now being pushed back to fit with the cheap challenger pricing.
If you’re a business user these MNVOs are not for you of course… But as a private consumer – who needs voLTE or WiFi calls? Maybe once 3g shuts down – sure… But before? The average consumer might make one phone call per day? Mobile internet and SMS reliability is much more important to them and I’ve rarely been to a place where I didn’t have at least 4G with o2
The infrastructure for VoLTE / wifi calling is also used to deliver SMS (at least it does on the quality networks, no idea about O2). It also provides a much nicer experience when you do make or receive a call.
Again, the question isn’t “why do you need these features”, it’s “why isn’t O2 keeping up with all of its competitors”.
Did O2 fund the survey?
This index is a survey sent out to “run-of-the mill” customers, who probably don’t know about 4G calling, VoLTE, WiFi calling, anyone who reads this site has more knowledge of mobile networks and how they tick, the average customers, wants some mobile data, minutes and texts and if it doesn’t work or is slow they usually put up with it.
Come up with all the theories you want about how O2 based companies are doing well, but you’re not thinking normally, if you think they care about the intricate details we talk about on here.
They probably don’t have Speedtest or any other moble testing app on their phone, if their Netflix connects, they can stream something, make a WhatsApp call they’ll be happy, and if those companies are performing well them good on them, we should celebrate companies are trying, not throw mud on them because of one bad experience we had, so much negativity and criticism.