Vodafone saw complaints from its mobile customers soar in the last year, with the telco blaming IT issues.
According to Ofcom’s quarterly telco complaints report, encompassing EE, O2, Talk Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Three UK, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone, in 2015 complaints about Vodafone’s mobile services veered sharply away from other industry competitors.
They rose from 15 per 100,000 in Q4 2014, to 32 per 100,000 by the same time the following year. The more than doubling took place between Q2, where the figure was 14 per 100,000, and Q4 2015.
In the same period, other mobile providers saw their number of complaints fall or stay roughly level.
EE, for example, saw its number fall from around 12 to 7.
Ofcom said the issues mainly related to issues about billing, pricing and charges, complaints handling and fault, service or provision issues.
Vodafone blamed a major programme in 2015 to transfer customers to a new billing system, "aimed at simplifying the operation of their accounts and opening up a range of better services, such as ‘click and collect’."
The spokesperson said that the company now expected that this and other investments would start to deliver a "step change in customer experience".
Vodafone also apologised to all customers who had an issue with its services, adding that they were "working hard to improve our customers’ experience" and saying that "more recent data is showing an improvement."
In the report, Ofcom said that all other providers were below the industry average of 10 complaints, although Vodafone’s unusually high number had presumably skewed this mean to be higher than it normally would.
Taking a median of the results, which lessens the effect of outliers, would give a figure of 6, putting EE and Talk Mobile above the average.
Compared to other providers, Tesco Mobile continued to receive the lowest relative volume of complaints.
