New 2024 Study Ranks 26 UK Broadband ISPs for Customer Service
A recent Freedom of Information Request (FoIR) filed by Broadband Genie has revealed that complaints to Ofcom about UK telecoms providers (broadband, mobile etc.) increased by 37% last year to 34,000. In response, the comparison site has published a new survey of customer service, which sees YouFibre, Trooli and Zen Internet top the table.
Consumers typically send their complaints about internet service and phone providers to different places, such as the provider itself, Ofcom, the ISPA or any one of two independent Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) complaints handlers (i.e. Communications Ombudsman or CISAS).
Ofcom does not typically investigate individual complaints themselves (they normally leave that up to ISPs and the ADR process), but they can use the feedback to help identify wider problems, which may result in larger investigations and possible penalties. For example, the regulator is currently investigating Virgin Media over digital phone migrations (here) and problems with service cancellations (here).
In response to this rise in complaints, the comparison site has today published new research that examines customer care in the broadband industry and ranks providers by their quality of customer service, among other things. But it’s worth noting that the results were based on a fairly small survey of 2,662 broadband bill payers – collected from 28th September 2023 – 8th February 2024.
Nevertheless, the top providers for customer service quality were found to be YouFibre (95%), Trooli (94%) and Zen Internet (89%). By comparison, the worst three providers were named as Onestream (48%), Airband (55%) and Shell Energy (58%). In terms of just the biggest four – BT ranked 11th (70%), Sky Broadband tied with BT’s score, TalkTalk ranked 16th (66%) and Virgin Media was way down in 22nd position (59%).
Survey of Customer Service Quality
1. YouFibre (95%)
2. Trooli (94%)
3. Zen Internet (89%)
4. toob (84%)
5. Plusnet (82%)
6. Truespeed (81%)
7. Three UK (79%)
8. Community Fibre (76%)
9. NOW Broadband (71%)
10. Utility Warehouse (70%)
11. BT (70%)
12. Sky (70%)
13. Lit Fibre (69%)
14. Gigaclear (69%)
15. EE (68%)
16. TalkTalk (66%)
17. KCOM (65%)
18. Vodafone (64%)
19. BRSK (64%)
20. Hyperoptic (62%)
21. SSE (62%)
22. Virgin Media (59%)
23. WeFibre (58%)
24. Shell Energy Broadband (58%)
25. Airband (55%)
26. Onestream (48%)
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 Linkedin.
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Good to see Virmin media near the bottom, why are we not at all surprised.
Maybe, just maybe it’s all the smoke and mirrors price increases annually that are annoying people? (even though they believe putting it in the contract as a term is perfectly acceptable)…just a thought!
Virgin should be right at the bottom.
Community Fibre customer service was good (before outsourcing to South Africa), but now it is the same as Virgin.
Phoned CF twice, first time the S.A.rep slammed the phone down, and the second time I did not understand what the S.A. rep was saying.
I agree
Be nice to know the rankings below!
The other end of the spectrum!
Having used both Virgin Media and Onestream, I refuse to accept for one minute that Virgin are rated higher. VM Is all outsourced script readers who have zero interest in helping and only upselling. Retentions is a joke too.
Meanwhile with Onestream you get a quick response on the phone or email or chat and they are all UK Based. Always had friendly and helpful service and when they promised me a call back they did just that.
Honestly the more I read into it the more confused I get. BT, EE and Plusnet all have quite different scores, but customer service calls are handled by the exact same people for all 3 brands too.