Ofcom says broadband and mobile complaints are down across the board

UK comms regulator Ofcom has published its latest quarterly report on the number of complaints it receives related to landline, broadband, mobile and pay-TV services.

Covering the period between July and September last year, Ofcom claims in general complaints across the board are at all time low levels. Specifically broadband, landline and pay TV saw reductions in complaints during the period, with nearly all providers seeing an improvement in their figures. For pay-monthly mobile, complaints were flat but ‘historically low’.

They’ve gone to town with the infographics demonstrating every possible angle of this information – but here are the winners and losers per category:

For broadband TalkTalk and Shell Energy took the wooden spoon with 17 complaints per 100,000 customers, apparently mainly due to faults and service issues. For mobile operators, iD Mobile (4 complaints), Vodafone (3) and Virgin Mobile (3) were the most complained about, and Virgin Media (8) was the worst offender in the pay TV space. Apparently the chief reason these firms generated flack was over how they handled complaints.

EE (1), Tesco Mobile (1) and Sky Mobile (2) took the least number of complaints in the mobile category, while Sky (1) was the least complained-about pay-TV provider. While that’s not quite the zippy phrase its marketing bods will want to plaster on billboards, it’s obviously where you want to be on a ranking like this.

“Complaints have fallen to a record low, and we expect providers to keep working to achieve the highest standards,” said Fergal Farragher, Ofcom’s Consumer Protection Director. “If you’re unhappy with your provider, it’s worth shopping around. We’ve made it easier than ever to switch, and you could end up with better customer service as well saving money.”

This latter quote raises an interesting question around average consumer behaviour, and how firmly we can draw conclusions of quality through the lens of Ofcom complaints. What do most people do if they get a service outage, or a bad call with customer service? Impossible to measure, but if they are not happy and if they can be bothered, many may just switch at the next opportunity rather than even complain to the operator itself, let alone the UK regulator.

While figures like this are all good stuff, and not to take the shine off Ofcom’s arbiter of quality crown too much, it could be asked how front of mind industry regulators are to the general public anyway. It would be interesting to know the proportion the population that know referring their mobile provider to Ofcom if they are miffed is even a thing that can be done.