09/05/2017
While 81% of small and medium sized enterprises regard telecoms services as fundamental to their businesses, each year at least 15% of them suffer quality of service issues that can result in reduced sales, reputational damage or other serious consequences, according to estimates in the first-ever Ofcom report to compare the quality of providers’ services.
‘Comparing service quality’ includes ‘Ofcom’s Comparing Service Quality report’ that draws on a combination of consumer research, complaints figures and providers’ data to compare the performance of mobile, landline and broadband providers to business and residential customers in 2016.
A second report, ‘UK home broadband performance 2016’, focuses on the performance of broadband providers to residential consumers in 2016.
Subsidiary reports include
- ‘How does your provider compare?’
- ‘Service quality for businesses’
- ‘Improve your service’
- ‘Our work on service quality’
‘Service quality for businesses’
The telecoms market serving SMEs is large and complex, with many providers, products and service levels. Ofcom has not attempted to compare them in its first report, although it aims to in future.
Some SMEs use residential or equivalent packages and they can, of course, compare providers’ performance via the residential services data.
Headline conclusions relating to SMEs include
- service quality can be even more important to businesses than to residential consumers
- while most SMEs are satisfied with the service they receive, a significant minority are dissatisfied – particularly with their broadband
- service quality/reliability and speed were the main cause of dissatisfaction with landline phone and broadband services
- coverage and service quality/reliability were the main issues for mobile users
- a wide range of service quality options are available to SME … although SMEs’ choices are inhibited by a lack of clear and comparable information on providers’ quality of service commitments
To coincide with the publication of the reports, Ofcom has also launched an interactive tool (‘Report: Comparing Service Quality’) that consumers can use to compare providers’ performance on call waiting, complaints handling and reliability in a simple, visual format.