How good are major service providers when it comes to offering quality broadband and home phone service to UK customers?
Every three months, UK communications regulator Ofcom throws light on this aspect by releasing market data numbers which let us know how many consumers complain over various issues such as billing, faults, complaints handling and pricing & charges.
We have just received the latest quarterly (Q2 2015) report of Ofcom according to which we come to know which ISPs have improved the service quality to minimise the volume of consumer complaints in the last three months. Not only broadband and phone services are assessed, mobile and pay TV operators’s quality is also reviewed through this complaints research carried out by Ofcom.
Ofcom publishes the data in the form of charts which helps us compare the volume of complaints per 1,000 customers or connections over the last 9 quarters from Q2 2013 to the latest Q2 2015.
From the charts, We could see only Virgin Media and Sky manage to contain the complaints volume well below the industry average, while Plusnet, BT, TalkTalk and EE have more complaints against their broadband & phone services all over the nine consecutive quarters including the latest one.
When it comes to mobile service, we see Vodafone has been replacing EE as the operator with largest volume of complaints in the last three quarters. While EE continues to be improving their service as revealed by the chart, O2 and Three UK have impressively maintained their top positions as operators with less volume of consumer complaints in Q2 2015 too.
UK’s Pay TV market has more operators now – Sky, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk. Sky TV has always been the best, followed closely by Virgin Media. BT and TalkTalk TV need to improve their TV services as the data shows their complaints volume is so high. In case of TalkTalk, complaints related to its TV service has in fact increased in the latest quarter.
So, the highlights of the latest market data research by Ofcom:
- EE is the most complained about ISP related to broadband and home phone
- Sky is the best provider in all three services it offer – TV, broadband and phone – because the least number of 1000 of its customers complain over various service issues.
- TalkTalk remains the second worst provider of broadband and phone, after EE.
- Plusnet and BT are not the best as their complaints data volume is still higher than the industry average.
- Looking for the best mobile operators with less problems? One could recommend O2 and Three UK without any hesitation. We also see EE’s performance has been impressive as reported by the decline in complaints in this quarter too.
- By contrast, Vodafone is the worst mobile operator in Q2 2015 too. The operator seems to be struggling in terms of performance from Q4 2014.
Broadband Complaints (per 1000 connections)
Source: Ofcom
Home Phone Complaints (per 1000 connections)
Source: Ofcom
Mobile Complaints (per 1000 connections)
Source: Ofcom