Don’t leave me hanging on the telephone

There are few things more frustrating than hanging on the line waiting for a customer service agent to pick up the phone.

Despite ‘your call being very important to them’, it feels disrespectful of our time and often makes the situation a lot worse when we do finally get through and have had a belly full of the hold music and suggestions to go onto their website or buy more of their products.

So it’s nice to hear that according to the latest Ofcom annual customer service report, mobile network Three are hitting it out of the park with an average response time of 47 seconds.

Other networks have not fared so well with EE having one of the worst at 3 minutes and 41 seconds in 2022, up from two minutes and 25 seconds in 2021. BT and iD Mobile have also allowed their customer call waiting times to increase.

O2, Tesco Mobile and Virgin Mobile tell a different story, however, and have reduced their customer call waiting times considerably which is no doubt greatly appreciated by their busy customers. O2 are best in class for improvements in this field by nearly halving their waiting time of 4 minutes down to 2 minutes and 33 seconds.

In general, mobile customers spent an average of 2 minutes and 23 seconds waiting for a customer service agent to pick up, an increase of 8 seconds from the year before. Comparatively, broadband and landline customers waited 2 minutes 37 seconds compared with 2 minutes and 16 seconds the year before. This has then been reflected in customer satisfaction with 87% of people being content with their mobile provider versus 82% for broadband and 77% for landline.

Average call waiting times by mobile provider

Customer satisfaction-wise, Tesco and giffgaff scored the highest at 95%, with Virgin Mobile scoring the lowest at 81%. Tesco and giffgaff also scored highly (95% and 93% respectively) for value for money with EE and Vodafone scoring way below average at 74% and 76%.

Ian Macrae, Ofcom’s Director of Market Intelligence added;

“We asked telecoms customers what frustrates them most with their providers. The message is clear: they want to get through to the right person on the phone quickly, and have their complaints dealt with first time. With switching becoming simpler, providers that continue to let standards slip should expect customers to show them the door.”

Reports show that although overall complaints to Ofcom may have reduced year on year, there is some clear work to be done by the mobile operators around call waiting times and complaint handling in general. Despite most corporate company’s best efforts, a call to customer service is still the main contact method for 77% of mobile customers and 90% of landline and broadband consumers. Next most popular contact method is webchat at 17% of mobile customers and 6% for landline and broadband contacts.

Mobile provider customer satisfaction

Ernest Doku, Telecoms Expert at Uswitch commented;

“It’s disappointing to see satisfaction with mobile customer service has fallen in the last 12 months, but heartening to see broadband remaining the same, and satisfaction remaining high overall. Investments in infrastructure, including the 5G roll out and ongoing 3G switch-off, should mean that consumers are getting more for their money, however providers must also ensure they continue to listen to their customer’s needs.

It is also deeply concerning to see that around only half of customer complaints are dealt with in a satisfactory manner. Shell Energy took the title for the longest waiting times of broadband providers, while EE had the longest for mobile.

It’s great to see Virgin Media has actually reduced broadband and mobile call waiting times – an impressive shift from being the worst performer in 2021 and 2019 for broadband and mobile respectively. A win for the company’s long-standing customer base, who will have experienced a dramatic improvement over time since their complaints were previously raised.”

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