Customers have voted Orange and TalkTalk the worst UK broadband providers for customer service, according to an annual survey of more than 10,500 UK residents.
Consumers placed "free" broadband provider Orange at the bottom of the rankings as more than one-third (35 percent) of its customers said they were not satisfied with their broadband service.
Fellow "free" fat-pipe provider TalkTalk, from the Carphone Warehouse, was not far behind — with 31 percent of its customers dissatisfied with its service despite its overhauling of its customer-service operations in a deal with CRM vendor NetSuite last year.
Customer service satisfaction also fell three percent across the board since October 2006, with a quarter of customers with top broadband providers dissatisfied with their broadband provider, the uSwitch.com survey reveals.
Chris Frost, communications expert at uSwitch.com, said new advances in broadband technology appear to be having an adverse effect, with connection problems and service interruptions occurring all too frequently and customers having to make numerous phone calls to get problems fixed.
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In response to the uSwitch survey, an Orange spokesperson said in a statement: "We acknowledge the findings of this survey but moreover listen to our customers and as a result, are aware that some of them have experienced service and technical issues over the past few months.
"We would like to reassure them that we work as effectively as possible to resolve their complaints. We also apologise to those customers who have experienced problems."
The spokesperson added: "We are taking steps to improve our network capacity and customer services, including investing heavily in our teams and will continue to do so... Our focus is on getting things right for our customers and we shall continue working to improve the levels of service we offer."
Plusnet topped the broadband rankings, with more than three-quarters (78 percent) of customers satisfied with its services, followed by AOL, Sky and Virgin Media with 76 percent customer satisfaction rates apiece.
This is the first time the uSwitch.com survey has interviewed broadband customers from both Sky and Virgin Media.
Frost added: "Despite the on-going spat between the two providers, both claiming to offer a better deal than the other, the results astonishingly show the two media giants coming neck-and-neck with a score of 76 percent, placing them in second place alongside AOL."
TalkTalk was not available for comment at the time of publication.
Talkback
For the past six month, I am enduring the so called "services" from TalkTalk, and can hardly believe that anyone should be worse than them! Technical problems are being ignored, if you manage to speak to anyone there, that is. I cannot remember ever having managed to get through to someone with less then a 10minutes wait (at least!), and even then you're faced with rude staff who (quote) "will not put you through to my manager"! So obviously, you cannot even complain about the bad service! In the meantime, telephone line connection broke off during conversation, or were not even available to start with, and broadband connection only works about 3 out of 10 times you try to connect to a server! Not sure how Orange could "top" this!
I would certainly agree with these claims that TalkTalk was the worst for customer service. Firstly I have a HND in Software Engineering, I went for a job interview about a year ago at TalkTalk as Broadband Advisor and am so glad that I didn't get the job. I couldn't believe how unprofessional they were, first thing was the interviewer was an 30 minutes late for the interview, then at the end of the interview we were given a test to complete, the questions on the test were totally irrellevant for broadband, questions like "such an error code comes up in Windows 95 what does this mean?" - erm... yeah Windows 95 is so pre-historic and like I am going to know straight off the top of my head what an error code means in Windows, normally to get this answer I'd google it, when I got home I did google it to find out, it turns out it means the phone line is disconnected on a DIAL-UP connection, now hang on a minute here I was going for a BROADBAND advisors job so why the hell would I need to know about DIAL-UP errors on such an old OS as Windows 95 (it's even more funny when you find out that their ADSL modems they give away don't work with anything less than Windows 98SE anyway - although if you know what your doing you can get them to work with Xubuntu).
Then to make matters even worse, a few months after being turned down for a job with them I get a call from a friend who'd just switched to them, she said she was getting no-where, she'd just switched to them and all they were telling her was to contact LinkSys as it was her router that wasn't connecting to their service, and LinkSys were telling her there is nothing wrong with her router and to contact TalkTalk, so she called me! Five minutes later we had the router working with TalkTalk - the problem - very simple one, when you change ISP you also need to change the username and password on the router by going to the "Default Gateway" (quite often 192.168.1.1) and logging in with the routers username and password (quite often either admin, admin or user, user) and then changing the ISPs username and password in the ADSL section, now if only TalkTalk had asked sensible questions like this on their test, they might actually have got technicians who knew how to fix such a simple problem like this instead of referring people between various "premium" rate phone numbers. One of my other friends also switched to TalkTalk, her problem though was slightly a bit more technical - she was using a really old laptop for her son who was about 8 (she didn't want to spend loads 'cos he might break it) and the laptop would only just about run Windows 98 (and very slowly!), so to solve this problem I installed Xubuntu onto the system and got the modem working, with Xubuntu skins it now looks very similar to Windows XP and works far faster than Windows 98 (ok that one is really technical and probably not something you could tell someone to do over the phone as you need to find the firmware for the modem and set up and edit a few text files to make it all work fine!)