UK surfers slam ISPs for poor support

Internet service providers (ISPs) are failing to provide adequate service support to their customers, according to a poll released today.

The survey, carried out by support automation firm, support.com, found that 60 per cent of 436 IT professionals interviewed do not rate the telephone support they receive from their ISP.

In addition, two thirds think email support is poor, and 70 per cent complain about their web-based support.

Around two thirds of ISP customers encounter technical problems at least once a month, according to support.com. This indicates that ISPs are adding to their support workload with poor quality of service delivery, according to Terry Lawlor, support.com's director of marketing.

With 10 million internet subscribers in the UK, this equates to nearly 6 million technical support incidents each month.

"The level of service clearly isn't good enough," said Lawlor. "ISPs are under pressure from the growth in internet users. Do they invest resources into improving quality of internet provision, or in their support staff."

Analysts put the poor response down to teething troubles in the relatively young ISP market, and that some service providers had set up their call centres on the cheap.

"It is a very doable thing to change ISP if companies are failing to offer good quality service and customer support," said Kevin Lucas of analyst group AMR Research.

"It sounds obvious, but ISPs must understand their customers better."