Comparing Customer Services

Where can I look for comparisons and analysis of Customer Services across all providers ?

All I see so far on these forums are detailed descriptions of individual and very specific dealings with one CS dept.

casablanca24

Third entry in the left-hand menu on the Main Site of these forums is a good starting point. Though it doesn't cover resellers.

See the Main Site link at the top right here. If you decide you want to be registered there you have to register again, but can use the same name and password if available.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Third entry in the left-hand menu on the Main Site of these forums is a good starting point. Though it doesn't cover resellers.

See the Main Site link at the top right here. If you decide you want to be registered there you have to register again, but can use the same name and password if available.

Dear RobertoS,

Thanks for quick reply, but regret I'm brand new to this Forum, and wonder if I understand where you suggest I look ?

For your 'Main Site' can you mean "Main Site" : www.thinkbroadband.com : where the 3rd one down of "Service Providers" is "Compare Broadband Service Providers" ?
But ticking here all I get is a meaningless bar graph of chosen providers, without any detail.
I can't even see what their data includes and doesn't include.

I'm looking for much more detail than this .... but not the endless detail of Forum writers telling of individual service issues with one provider.

If I was a member of "which?" the following page might have entries and be my start, but I'm not, so looking for an alternative :
http://www.which.co.uk/technology/computing/guides/w...

casablanca24

You have to decide what you find important and ask which ISP would be best for your requirements, not what someone else wants.

Unfortunately nearly all comparison sites, for all products not just broadband, only include suppliers who pay to advertise and be represented. For broadband this is extremely noticeable, with only the biggest few being shown and far better smaller ones not even being looked at.

If you look at the Which list of ISPs reported on, see this page you will see it is quite limited. It also fails to pick up on simple facts such as Tesco being C & W based, Madasafish, Greenee and Waitrose all being Plusnet-owned and in effect fully absorbed, with Plusnet itself being of course BT-owned but quite different in its offerings. Unless this sort of thing is covered in the detailed reports.

It also says, (if you look at the 5 pages of packages), nothing about the considerable number of resellers using Be, C & W and TalkTalk wholesale connections. It says "Exclusive to 1 retailer", which I expect is universally true - but is somewhat misleading when the resellers often offer a far superior service on the wholesale services.

Note you can have a trial run there for £1. I didn't look at the detail, and I expect you need to set up then cancel the full payment instructions, but you do have that option.

On the TBB comparison, if you rest the cursor on a bar it gives you the number of votes cast. The rating you can give is 1-5 stars. Some are tiny, some are in the thousands.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

If you look at the Which list of ISPs

If you look at LLU suppliers, O2, Sky, TT, AOL and used to be Orange, Which also scores their LLU and BTw offerings as identical, which is ludicrous. I tried to get them realise this but they couldn't get it into their heads

I'm not signed up, can only see the lists, not the reports. I expect you couldn't even get them to understand the technical difference, never mind the associated costs and hence performance effects.

As for CS, it was an awful long time, many months or even into years, before O2 support understood that Access was any different technically from LLU, and that even simple things like the router settings were different.

Registered users on the main site vote each month, and hovering over each bar gives some stats.

I have to ask what information are you looking for?

The cold technical information is available in the ISP listing for each ISP. Easy to post comments that many places support are open to abuse, both from the pro and anti on each ISP, but as a general rule if on 3 or 4 sites you see similar rankings of providers, then probably some basis of truth in the comparative levels