Survey
14 September 2021
Mobile and internet satisfaction survey 2021
Who do you have to call around here for decent internet and mobile services?
Internet connection not performing as promised? Hard to get your telco to pick up the phone when there’s a problem? Latest survey results show which companies are doing the best – and worst – jobs when it comes to keeping customers satisfied.
People's Choice winners
Skinny and 2degrees are the recipients of our People's Choice award for mobile services. 2degrees is our People’s Choice recipient for broadband. The award is given to providers that rate above average for customer satisfaction and meet our other performance criteria.
Internet provider ratings
Overall satisfaction
Customers experiencing internet service issues in the past two years
The most common problems reported by internet customers related to service performance (such as internet speed), availability, billing and customer service. Among those who contacted their telco about a problem, 54% said it took “a lot of effort” to deal with the company.
Internet satisfaction
Sixty-one percent of customers were happy with the service they were getting from their internet provider.
2degrees took top spot, scoring 72 percent for overall satisfaction.
It also rated above average for being easy to contact (67 percent) and the quality of its customer service (66 percent). Skinny also rated well on this measure (77 percent).
Vodafone stood out for all the wrong reasons.
Its internet customers were significantly more likely to experience problems: 66 percent reported running into issues over the past two years. That compares with the industry average of 56 percent.
Billing problems continue to dog the telco. One in five Vodafone customers reported a billing issue.
Customers were also significantly more likely to be dissatisfied with the support provided when they needed help: one in six were dissatisfied on this measure.
For overall satisfaction, Vodafone ranked last, scoring 56 percent.
Mobile provider ratings
Overall satisfaction
Customers experiencing mobile service issues in the past two years
The most common problems reported by mobile customers related to service availability, performance (such as speed), billing and customer service. Among those who contacted their telco about a problem, 60% said it took “a lot of effort” to deal with the company.
Mobile satisfaction
Overall, 63 percent of customers were very satisfied with the service they were getting from their mobile provider.
Two telcos topped the ratings: Skinny scored 75 percent and 2degrees scored 69 percent for overall satisfaction.
Skinny’s been an above-average performer for several years and continues to outrate Spark, its parent company.
This year, Skinny was the only telco to rate above average for satisfaction with pricing: 74 percent of customers with the pre-pay provider were happy with what they paid.
The company’s customers were also less likely to report issues with their mobile service.
Across the mobile market, 38 percent of customers had experienced a problem in the past two years. Service availability and performance were the most common issues.
Vodafone customers were again significantly more likely to report issues: 44 percent had run into problems in the past two years.
For overall satisfaction, Vodafone placed last: 58 percent of customers where very satisfied with the company’s service (the industry average is 63 percent).
Who’s who?
Spark and Vodafone are the biggest players in the telco market.
Spark, which also owns Skinny, holds an estimated 40 percent of the broadband market and 40 percent of the mobile market.
Vodafone has an estimated 21 percent share of broadband and 40 percent of mobile.
Vocus Communications is the third biggest player in broadband, with a 13 percent share. Vocus owns Orcon and Slingshot.
2degrees is best known as a mobile operator (holding a 19 percent market share). It also holds seven percent of the broadband market.
Other companies in our internet ratings table include MyRepublic and Trustpower.
MyRepublic set up shop in 2013 and is owned by Singapore-based MyRepublic Group.
Settling disputes
If you have an issue with a telco and haven’t been able to resolve it with the company, you can take your case to the Telecommunications Dispute Resolution service. The service is free for consumers.
About our survey
Our data are from a nationally representative survey of 2126 New Zealanders aged 18 years and over, which took place in June 2021. The survey was carried out in conjunction with the Commerce Commission as part of its “Consumer Telecommunications Survey 2021”, conducted by Research New Zealand.
- Companies are those with 30 responses or more (response numbers are in brackets).
- Overall satisfaction shows the percentage of consumers who rated their internet/mobile retailer 8, 9 or 10 on a scale from 0 (very dissatisfied) to 10 (very satisfied).
- Where a respondent used a company for both internet and mobile services, they were only asked to rate the retailer once for overall satisfaction (rather than give separate ratings for mobile and internet). In reporting results for these respondents, it’s assumed satisfaction for each service was the same.
Member comments
19 Sep 2021
Vodafone is a telco that you can't actually ring!
After recent outages this year from Vodafone (including a large Nationwide mobile data outage) with no communication or explanation, being forced from VDSL (not great but a least consistent performance) to Wi-Fi broadband, then back to VDSL because of the terrible performance (in a small town with the cell tower in line of sight of the router - go figure) then Vodafone saying, "oh, you didn't need to change" we have given up and are in the process of kicking them out of our home.
Finally fibre has come to our town and we are going to go to a provider we can actually contact and not sit for over an hour in automated voice messaging hell.
When I called the provider we are looking at, the phone rang 6 times and then a person...a real live PERSON answered - they were friendly, helpful and sounded like they worked at a job they might even like!
The large Telco's need to remember that they have actual live people as customers who cannot wait over an hour on the phone when things go wrong.
Also how is it, in practical terms, major telecommunications companies can not be realistically contacted?
Only after hours of ringing, the calls being dropped after 25 minutes mysteriously off their queue, ring, go around and around in circles to only get someone who basically takes a message and cannot help you.
"teleCOMMUNICATIONS"!!!
It's in the name of what they do (or I suppose don't).
At least with a major outage they could put a message on their phones acknowledging there is a problem they are working on ...
But what would I know with only a couple of decades of working in ICT support roles ...
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