TalkTalk somehow retains most-complained-about-ISP title AGAIN

Stiff competition for masochists-favourite title

TalkTalk has once again been crowned the worst broadband and telephone provider by its cheesed-off customers, communications regulator Ofcom confirmed this morning.

The budget ISP was plonked at the top of the gripes pile in the watchdog's latest quarterly report, which covers the period between April and June 2012.

The purpose of Ofcom's name-and-shame exercise is to shock telcos into improving their poor customer service records. But it's arguably a point lost on TalkTalk, which repeatedly gets voted the worst ISP by its long-suffering punters.

The comms watchdog did note that all telecoms operators had notched up lower volumes of complaints for the three months to June this year.

Ofcom said that for the landline telephone market it "received the most complaints during the second quarter of 2012 from customers of TalkTalk Group, with 0.53 complaints per 1,000 customers."

Billing and customer service problems continue to be whinged about by TalkTalk subscribers. In 2011, the company was slapped with a massive £3m fine after wrongly billing tens of thousands of customers for services they never received. Ofcom said on Wednesday that complaints of this kind about TalkTalk were at their lowest since the regulator first started publishing such data in 2010.

But the fact remains that TalkTalk is still head-and-shoulders above its big name rivals in the ISP market – at least, when it comes to complaints. On landline complaints, BT came a distant second with 0.19 gripes per 1,000 customers.

And TalkTalk also came top-of-the-pops for receiving the most gripes from customers signed-up to its broadband service.

It reeled in 0.42 moans per 1,000 punters - with many complaining about line faults and a variety of service issues. It's closest competitor for the title of most-moaned-about broadband provider was BT with 0.31 complaints per 1,000 customers.

The Register asked TalkTalk to respond to Ofcom's latest report. It gave us this statement:

TalkTalk received its lowest ever number of complaints about landline and broadband services. There were 35 per cent fewer landline complaints compared with the same quarter last year, while broadband complaints fell 28 per cent.

We recognise that there is still work to do and we are continually pushing through improvements. Technical faults are fixed faster, more support is being offered when customers move house, and our online support system, which now accounts for 70 per cent of customer contacts, is being further enhanced.

In the same Ofcom report, 3UK received the most complaints from pay-monthly customers for the quarter, while BT Vision was the most griped about Pay TV service during the period from April to June this year. ®