Study Claims UK Broadband Users Lost £98m to Poor Customer Service
A new survey of 4,101 nationally representative UK adults, which was conducted by Which? in May 2024, has estimated that 950,000 consumers were £89m worse off over the last year due to giving up contacting their broadband provider after a poor experience. The magazine previously named Virgin Media as being the worst ISP for customer service (here and here).
The survey, which claims that an estimated 9.2 million broadband consumers also experienced emotional harm as a result of poor customer service, found that 14% who contacted their ISP said they gave up seeking a resolution due to problems they experienced with the customer service and 29% said that this left them financially worse off (on average they estimated they were £93 worse off as a result, which is quite anecdotal).
A small proportion of consumers (c.2%) said they did not even contact their broadband provider due to previous bad experiences with their customer service, which the consumer magazine said added an additional £6m to consumers being worse off due to poor customer service in the broadband sector.
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Summary of Further Survey Findings
➤ Some 36% of people who contacted their broadband provider reported having at least one problem that wasted their time (e.g. not being able to reach customer service, phone calls being disconnected, being passed between departments and long call waits).
➤ On average, Which? estimates those who experienced time-wasting customer service issues lost 1 hour 38 minutes of their time due to broadband customer service problems.
➤ Which? estimates that consumers experienced time harm in 18.3 million customer service problems with their broadband provider in the past year.
➤ In total, broadband customers spent an estimated 13.4 million hours in a year on customer service issues.
➤ Some 57% of respondents that experienced at least one broadband related customer service problem reported feeling frustrated, while 29% said they felt angry and 19% reported feeling helpless.
➤ More than one in ten of those who had experienced a customer service problem reported feeling upset or distressed. Feelings of helplessness and “upsetness” were most commonly reported amongst customers who did not receive a response to their email (43% feeling helpless and 41% upset) or spoke to an unhelpful or dismissive advisor (38% helpless and 33% upset).
Clearly, there’s a general need for broadband providers to improve their customer support. Such firms must ideally be providing a range of easily accessible contact methods, while problems should be resolved in a timely and efficient way, and customers should be treated with empathy and care. But it’s clear that many businesses are failing to deliver against this most basic of criteria.
However, experiences do tend to vary quite a lot between different ISPs, which is something that the consumer magazine has previously covered (here and here). Earlier this year Which? named Virgin Media, Scottish Power and British Gas as the worst energy and broadband firms for customer service. Both British Gas and Virgin Media responded to that by saying they were making improvements, but Which? highlights how their research shows many of their customers remain dissatisfied.
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.
People buy cheap and are surprised when the customer service is poor…
To be fair, British Gas is not cheap, and nor is Virgin Media unless you’re prepared to play the haggling game.
It’s a shame that these companies see their customers as a cost base to be minimised, not a revenue base.
However, in both broadband and energy sectors, margins are wafer-thin, and competition is intense. People will choose one broadband provider over another just because it’s 50p per month cheaper. If they think about customer service at all, they’ll probably hope they won’t need it, or will assume that everyone is as bad as everyone else.
Not really. Virgin Media is expensive and yet they have a negative reputation for support. Why do you think you should have to pay extra for decent customer service? It should be standard, not a premium.
Meanwhile, 99.9% of CSRs reported over-entitled customers demanding the impossible such as engineers and/or replacement equipment arriving within 20 seconds of their call ending.
This is fairly accurate. There’s been an increase of demanding and entitled callers with the most trivial making the most noise. Last year we had a report sent to OFCOM that marked over twenty agents who had touched the account. Instant fine for us not resolving the problem and investigation of calls to find the failure. The problem? Customer didn’t want to type in their wireless password. Just as each agent had asked them to do.
That extremism used to be a novelty to have a laugh over. Now it’s the status quo.
It’s quite easy to end up out of pocket, when the ISP is not a member of the Ofcom compensation scheme and then Openreach take 29 days to fix a ‘most reliable’ fibre fault.
Lots of these issues would be negated if the companies actually pumped money and time into training the Cs reps and their managers, instead of draining them dry of every bit of sanity and compassion, that lots of the reps just don’t care any longer
Customer service is lacking with some ISPs but having been with a few different ones and having worked for a couple, it’s not always the ISP that’s the issue. Some customers simply have unrealistically high expectations.
For example, a customer demanding a same day Openreach engineer because their PRINTER wouldn’t connect to their router which they sourced themselves. Or the customers complaining they ONLY get 700 Mbps on their 900 Mbps service but refuse to try a wired connection and end up logging a complaint and wasting our time over nothing.
Then there’s the people who complain about a 15ms ping time as the reason they’re losing in COD. Yet we have monitored their connection for weeks and can’t see any packet loss.
These are simple things the general public don’t understand and they seem to think that by paying us for broadband, we are there to offer full IT support for every aspect of their digital lives.
Then there’s the ones who use the Which? Name as something to threaten us with: “just wait til Which? hear about this”.
These customers clog up our phone lines and make it much harder to deal with our other customers who are facing genuine outages and end up stuck in the queue because the above customers are tying up our agents for an hour at a time.