A survey of UK broadband customers has found the big four internet service providers lag behind smaller organisations.
The second annual customer satisfaction study from Cable.co.uk found that BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk customers are less satisfied than those of their smaller competitors.
Newcomer SSE came out top in the survey of 6,000 UK consumers, Plusnet and Post Office Broadband came in second and third.
“Broadly speaking, the more customers you have the more difficult it can be to keep them happy. High call volumes often force larger companies to migrate to more one-size-fits-all solutions that target the most common problems, but that often means a struggle for customers whose difficulties don’t fit a predetermined ‘type’,” said Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms expert and Director of Communications at Cable.co.uk.
“Customers often have different priorities. If you want the fastest speeds or the most TV channels, you may be willing to accept middling or even poor customer service and problem handling to get it, and rationalise that choice by supposing it will never happen to you. But of course, it often does.”
SSE, the energy supplier that only introduced broadband at the end of 2014, achieved the highest customer satisfaction score of 7.94 out of 10 in the OnePoll survey. Sky was 5th (listed after ‘other small providers’) and Virgin Media 6th.
