While Ofcom saw the total complaints against major broadband, landline & mobile service providers’ fall, some providers performed better than others this quarter.
While most consumers take their complaints to their providers first, Ofcom still receive around 300 consumer complaints every day. The data, unveiled Tuesday, is based on these complaints made directly to Ofcom, on issues such as difficultly changing providers; faults or service limitations; billing issues; or concerns about poor internal complaints handling. The data focuses on the providers with the largest market share, who together account for over 90% of each area covered by the report.
So how did everybody do?
It may be of little surprise that following poor results last quarter, EE continued to generate the most complaints for landline telephone and broadband services. The majority of these complaints were about faults or service limitations, despite EE promising earlier in the year to make solving their broadband issues a top priority. The providers with the smallest amount of complaints about landline and broadband – well below the industry standards – were Virgin Media and Sky, who continued for the 9th quarter in a row to dominate the competition.
Virgin Media performed less well for mobile pay-monthly services. For the first time in two years the volume of complaints received about Virgin rose above the industry standard to 0.8 per 1000. Way out ahead in complaints however were Vodafone, who hold the top spot with 0.14 complaints per 1000 customers for the second quarter in a row. The best performing provider for mobile pay-monthly services was Tesco Mobile, who have been consistently well under the industry standard level for complaints since early 2014.
Ofcom hope this data will help consumers make an informed decision about who to choose as their fixed line, mobile or broadband provider. Of course, complaints are not to only metric to be considered when choosing a provider – local availability and coverage as well as packages and prices are also important factors to research before making a decision.