Millions of UK residents are frustrated by the high call charges for helplines, some of the worst offenders being technical support lines for help with your broadband. It is almost cheeky that, on top of the customer having complaints with a particular service, they must pay unreasonable amounts to have them heard. The situation becomes crazier when you realise that, according to recent studies, some customers are paying up to £14.50 for a single call. Yet it is no surprise that when you initially make a call to get your broadband set up in the first place, the call will cost much less, and often even be free.
The new results come from a survey of 11,000 broadband users by comparison site Uswitch, which has found that most broadband providers charge customers a considerable amount for technical help. For example, Orange, which offers a tempting "free" broadband package actually charges callers up to 50p a minute for talking to support staff, this earning the company an average of £5.56 per phone call it receives.
Now, considering the fact that the company receives over a million calls a year, you don't need to do the maths to work out that that makes a hefty profit. You would even be forgiven for the cynical thinking that maybe services cause problems in the first place to get profit from phone calls!
Other companies seem to fare no better. For example, Virgin Media, the country’s second-biggest broadband provider after BT, recently raised its technical support charges in July from local rate all the way up to 25p a minute. Similarly, the provider Toucan now charges its customers 30p per minute. BT is still modest in comparison, charging 2p a minute, yet this is still above local rate for many.
What makes the whole matter worse is that the surveys have found that very few people are actually even satisfied with the help they've received when making the premium call. The results have shown less than half of Orange broadband customers have been happy with the service provided. This corresponds to the figures from another comparison site Moneysupermarket.com, which has ranked Orange as one of the worst providers of the lot for its quality of technical support - getting an average rating of 2.6 out of 10 from customers.
Finally, to make matters even worse, the survey from Uswitch found that only 4 out of every 10 people surveyed actually had their problem resolved in the first phone call - many had to try again up to 2 more times before a solution was found, with most providers even charging whilst the phone was on hold!
Because most of the providers seem to be as bad as each other in terms of customer service, the problem seems inescapable. Before signing up with a new provider it is worthwhile comparing the costs of all features and services, including support calls.
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