The best and worst broadband providers for customer service

Speed and price normally come tops when making decisions about which provider to pick for your home broadband. Customer service often gets overlooked. It’s only when things go wrong that this suddenly becomes the number one priority on everyone’s list. We’ve looked towards the most reliable non-biased source, the UK communications regulator, Ofcom, on how the different broadband providers compare when it comes to helping their customers out in times of need. Read on to find out the winners and losers when it comes to broadband customer service.

Hold, please

The Office of Communications (Ofcom) is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for our broadband services. It looks at a number of customer service factors, including:

• Satisfaction with the speed of service
• The number of customers with a reason to complain
• Overall satisfaction with complaint handling
• Ofcom complaints per 100,000 subscribers
• Average call centre waiting times
• Overall customer service satisfaction

Its quarterly complaints ranking reports are also updated every three months, so you’ll always be looking at the latest information.

Any complaints?

Let’s take a look at its latest report, published in April 2024. It’s worth pointing out with these that although the figures below might sound fairly low, these aren’t just complaints made to the broadband firms, but issues that have been escalated to the regulator due to not being able to get issues resolved directly with the provider. The actual number of unhappy customers will be far higher than this as these only over the most extreme cases.

Unfortunately there are only nine providers included in this customer service showdown. Ofcom only seeks out this information on providers with a more than 1.5% market share. In this section we're using 'Overall satisfaction' as the dominant factor, but have included the others as a matter of interest.

The results

 source: Ofcom

source: Ofcom

Sky was the clear winner with the fewest complaints. Virgin Media and NOW Broadband were bottom of the table. It’s worth noting that more customers may have been encouraged to complain about Virgin Media due to a public Ofcom investigation into the handling of complaints and the challenges customers face in cancelling contracts.

The bigger picture

For a more detailed – but slightly more dated – inspection, Ofcom’s seventh annual 2023 report shows an even clearer picture of how providers performed in every area.

Source: Ofcom

For broadband, Plusnet customers were more likely than average to be satisfied with their service overall (89%). TalkTalk (46%) and Virgin Media (46%) were both below average on how complaints were handled, while Sky was above average on this measure (55%).

One in five broadband customers (20%) said they had a reason to complain about their service or provider.

The call centre experience was identified as a key element of the complaints process, with call waiting times, getting through to the right person quickly, and dealing with the complaint first time all factors that participants in this research said could be improved.

Ian Macrae, Ofcom’s Director of Market Intelligence, says:

“We’ve asked telecoms customers what frustrates them most with their providers, and the message is clear: they want to get through to the right person on the phone quickly, and have their complaints dealt with first time.

“With switching becoming simpler, providers that continue to let standards slip should expect customers to show them the door.”

Switch for satisfaction

You don’t have to put up with poor communication and unhelpfulness. If you’re not happy with your current provider’s level of customer service try a provider that scored highly in the above.

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