Virgin Media customers ‘most dissatisfied’
November 25, 2011
Virgin Media has the biggest proportion of dissatisfied customers for landline, broadband and pay-TV services, according to Ofcom’s latest customer satisfaction tables.
In September, the media regulator conducted 3,000 interviews and various online surveys of customers of landline, mobile, fixed broadband and pay-TV operators with a market share of 4 per cent or more.
Virgin Media has traditionally fared reasonably well in terms of customer service, but these latest results show that the cable operator now has the most dissatisfied customers across phone, Internet and TV services.
In fixed broadband, almost a fifth (19 per cent) of Virgin Media customers were dissatisfied with their service, ahead of BT with 18 per cent, TalkTalk/Tiscali with 17 per cent, Orange with 16 per cent and Sky with 15 per cent.
Satisfaction rating for Virgin Media was 57 per cent, level with BT and ahead of TalkTalk (55 per cent), but behind Sky, which had 64 per cent of its customers satisfied with their service.
Ofcom said that connection speed remains the biggest issue for broadband customers, despite recent figures showing that Virgin offers some of the most reliable line speeds in the UK. Another big issue for users was changing package or service.
Virgin Media also fell behind in terms of landline services, with 22 per cent of its customers dissatisfied, exactly double the percentage that were not happy with Sky’s telephony services.
However, Virgin Media customers were less satisfied than average with the firm’s customer service, largely because there was an increase in the number of issues not being satisfactorily resolved, showing an overall decline in customer loyalty since February 2011.
Sky also pipped Virgin Media in the pay-TV sector, with 70 per cent of its customers satisfied against 62 per cent for Virgin Media, while just 10 per cent of Sky’s satellite subscribers were dissatisfied against Virgin’s 16 per cent.