A survey among 1140 UK smartphone owners reveals significant differences in mobile operator satisfaction.
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While 77% average satisfaction (people who rated their operator with 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale) sounds rather good a few operators should definitely be concerned with potential customer churn.
Orange and T-Mobile seem to be in the toughest spot seeing the lowest satisfaction scores and the highest percentage of current clients thinking of switching to a competing offer.
Cheap and cheerful with budget providers
Giffgaff, Virgin Mobile and Tesco Mobile were the positive surprises in our survey. They had the highest satisfaction scores, and fewest existing customers are thinking of leaving.
80% of the customers of these three operators stated that price was the most important factor for them and the budget operators don't disappoint resulting in happy clients.
What's important?
Price, signal coverage, and unlimited data were the highest rated features on an aggregated level but there are some interesting differences when we look at the different networks separately.
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EE is an interesting one for a few reasons - for obvious reasons its clients are more focused on the data speed. Looks like EE's focus (and advertising spend) on 4G and speed is paying off.
EE also has one of the lowest percentage of people thinking of leaving. The likely reason for this is that almost 40% of its clients have become their clients only recently, within the last 6 months. For the other operators the average percentage of people who've switched in the last 6 months was 18%.
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The research was carried out by On Device Research among 1140 smartphone owners in the UK over a weekend in February 2014.
