TalkTalk is UK's worst broadband provider

[BGonaSTICK]

Customers have voted TalkTalk and NTL the worst UK broadband providers, as customer satisfaction falls across the industry with more people switching ISPs, according to annual rankings by research company JD Power and Associates.

Telewest came out top of the rankings, which are based on responses from 1,438 customers across the UK, for the second year running, scoring highest on performance and reliability, and customer service and technical support.

Telewest was followed by AOL, Tiscali, BT and Orange, with NTL and then TalkTalk at the bottom of the rankings. AOL scored highest on image and Tiscali scored highest on cost.

The 2006 UK Broadband ISP report also showed the overall customer satisfaction ranking, which is based on things like performance, reliability, customer service, cost and billing, fell this year due to lower customer service scores across all the ISPs.

In particular the average waiting time to speak with customer service agents has increased by two minutes to 8.7 minutes since last year.

"The 2006 study highlights the adverse affect poor call management can have on customer satisfaction levels," said Caspar Tearle, director of service industry research at JD Power, in the report.

As dissatisfaction with broadband services increases, the number of customers switching supplier is rising, with one-fifth changing their ISP in the last year -- up from 15 per cent in 2005. Another quarter of customers said they are likely to change ISP in the next 12 months.

It's not only consumers looking to change their broadband provider. Results from another 2006 ISP satisfaction survey by AccountingWeb show that reliability is the most important factor for 78 per cent of business customers, with half of the 400 companies questioned saying they would consider switching ISP to get improved reliability.

[Jimdefruit]

I imagine the NTL rating includes a large number of broadband users who are connected via set-top box rather than by dedicated modem.

I have found the customer service to be very slow and not particularly helpful but I have only had to call them once in over three years use and that was when they were upgrading the network. The reliability is very high.

I cant say that for AOL who gave a lot of trouble and also were poor on customer help.

[fergiz]

"TalkTalk is UK's worst broadband provider"

I could have told them that. :spite:

[Analoguesat]

I had one of my staff asking about TT recently. They were having terrible trouble trying to connect their newly purchased service. A computer literate friend had spent 2 hours trying to set it up and got nowhere, Customer Support couldnt figure out the problem...

It took me 5 minutes research to point out that seeing as none of the Borders exchanges had been LLU'd for TT there was no chance whatsoever of her getting the computer to connect to TT!...

[BGonaSTICK]

That's disgraceful. How on earth can TT sell a package on a line that's not supported?!?!? >

That's bordering on downright fraud. 'Damages' could be owing for costs incurred. Theaten to go to the press.