Sky and Virgin Media Gain Positive Reputation for UK Broadband

LONDON, BIOT - June 11, 2018 - PRLog -- The reputation of a business is often essential to its future growth and sometimes, even survival, which is just as true in the United Kingdom's telecoms and broadband industry as it is anywhere else.

In keeping with that a new online survey of 5,000 ISPreview.co.uk readers, which is a consumer information website focused on broadband ISPs, has noted how 80% of respondents agreed that a provider's reputation could impact their choice when they think of switching (18% answered "maybe" and 2% said "no").

Respondents were then asked to rate the reputation of the market's four largest home broadband providers by three simple grades - Good, Average or Poor. Overall BT fared the worst, followed by TalkTalk. Meanwhile Sky Broadband and Virgin Media both enjoyed a comparatively more positive reputation.

Virgin Media's reputation
Good – 68.7%
Average – 18.9%
Poor – 12.2%

Sky Broadband's reputation
Good – 67.5%
Average – 19.6%
Poor – 12.7%

TalkTalk's reputation
Poor – 34.4%
Average – 33.1%
Good – 32.4%

BT's reputation
Poor – 78.4%
Average – 15.8%
Good – 5.7%

Mark Jackson, ISPreview.co.uk's (https://www.ispreview.co.uk) Editor-in-Chief, said: "People only need to look at the sharp decline in customer numbers that followed the 2015 cyber-attack on TalkTalk's website and member database to understand how difficult it is to recover from a bad hit to reputation. Word spreads fast in the online world and the more hits that an ISP takes the harder it will become to recover."

"Predictably it's not just the big ticket fiascos that can damage a provider. Slow erosion can also occur when ISPs allow common complaints, such as poor service and support quality or unfair practices (e.g. hitting your customers with too many price hikes in the same 12 month period), to become endemic for the brand."

"Luckily bad reputations do not have to be terminal and we've seen plenty of businesses recover by changing their approach. Often the worst thing that an ISP can do is try to sweep problems under the carpet or dismiss them out of hand. Meanwhile for consumers it remains a simple case of once bitten, twice shy," concluded Jackson.