Sky and Virgin Media Top Ofcom’s Phone and Broadband Satisfaction Study

[Scubbie]

Sky and Virgin Media Top Ofcom

The United Kingdom’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has today published their annual study of consumer satisfaction with fixed line broadband, phone, pay TV and mobile providers, which is based on feedback received from around 6,000 consumers who were interviewed as part of the research. Overall it’s good news for Sky Broadband and Virgin Media, but less so for the others.

As usual Ofcom’s survey, which noted that overall satisfaction with fixed line phone and broadband services had increase ever so slightly, only examined the markets largest 4 – 6 providers and is thus not a full reflection of the industry. However we are a little disappointed to see that TalkTalk and BT weren’t included in the table of Pay TV providers, which appears to be because of insufficient data (despite both having over 1 million subscribers!)

Ofcom said the inclusion criteria for this year’s data capture was adjusted. The new criteria specifies that in order to qualify for inclusion in the report, providers need to have at least 4% market share and achieve a minimum sample of 35 respondents at Stage 1 of data collection. BTTV, TalkTalkTV, EE broadband and Tesco Mobile were excluded on the basis that insufficient sample was achieved at Stage 1.

Never the less it’s worth taking a look, not least since most consumers tend to pick from the big boys club.

Overall satisfaction with customer service by landline provider

	2009	2013	2014
BT	55%	63%	61%
TalkTalk	57%	66%	62%
Sky Broadband	67%	69%	79%
Virgin Media	61%	74%	72%
Sector Average	58%	66%	67%

Amazingly Sky was the only landline provider to have increased its overall customer service satisfaction score since 2013 (up 10 percentage points), which puts them well above the rest with Virgin Media closest on 72%. Ofcom’s separate consumer complaints report also tends to highlight Sky and Virgin as receiving the fewest broadband and phone gripes. Meanwhile TalkTalk seems to have gone downhill again.

Overall satisfaction with customer service by fixed broadband provider

	2009	2013	2014
BT	61%	63%	60%
Sky Broadband	63%	71%	75%
TalkTalk	60%	62%	62%
Virgin Media	60%	71%	76%
Sector Average	60%	66%	69%

Happily both Sky and Virgin saw a big boost on the broadband front, which follows on from their success in the fixed line phone market above, meanwhile TalkTalk was stable and BT went into a small decline. Connection speed was the main reason for broadband customers contacting their ISPs customer services department (19% of contacts).

Overall satisfaction with customer service by mobile provider

	2009	2013	2014
Three UK EE O2 Virgin Mobile Vodafone	63% n/a 73% 73% 69%	74% n/a 82% 71% 77%	70% 69% 78% 76% 71%
Sector Average	69%	75%	73%

Overall satisfaction with customer service by pay TV provider

	2009	2013	2014
Sky	66%	80%	81%
Virgin Media	66%	77%	78%
Sector Average	66%	77%	80%

It should be noted that the above data is based on feedback from consumers who had contacted their provider between July and September 2014. A full breakdown of the results can be found here.

[bubblegun]

Are Sky and Virgin more willing to "bribe customers"? does this have an effect on customers?

Seriously, I hope people with "Openreach" issues, have the same issue with their new providers and so won't blame Sky for the previous providers problems.

Although one issue with some (up to 40mb/s) customers you/I may get is people who signed up a while ago who are getting a M.A.L.S. of ~25Mb/s which is all Openreach are "required" to provide on their line despite the estimated speed of 40Mb/s+.
Whereas (for instance) their neighbour may sign more recently and get a M.A.L.S. of 36.1Mb/s or another may sign up to the 80/20 service and get the same ****ty download speed of ~24Mb, but still get the improved upload speeds of~20Mbit.

[Scubbie]

Thankfully Sky, along with CityFibre and TalkTalk, are developing a new FTTP product for York which should launch next year.

It'll be interesting to see how FTTC customers in York get treated once it does launch.