The charity said the number of people contacting it with a mobile or broadband problem each year is now more than double the figure in 2020 (around 15,000).
Citizens Advice said UK consumers had more issues they wanted to complain about with mobile and broadband providers (16%) than in any other essential services market, including energy (12%), postal services (9%), water (5%) or financial services (4%).
The most complained-about issues
Citizens Advice said the top five telecoms issues people contacted its consumer service about were:
- Technical issues (21% of all mobile and broadband complaints)
- Billing problems (20%)
- Issues with cancelling (14%)
- Fraud and scams (12%)
- Mis-selling and marketing (11%)
Tom MacInnes, director of policy at Citizens Advice, said: “Clearly, consumers are facing significant hurdles in this industry, but without a watchdog or advocate, they’ve no way of making their voices heard.
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“We see the fallout from this, with consumers coming to us every three-and-a-half minutes for help with telecoms issues.
“What we hear shows how urgently a statutory body to represent consumers is needed. There will be benefits for providers too, decreasing the number of issues [that] escalate unnecessarily, and result in people cancelling their contracts.”
How to deal with telecoms issues
If you have any issues, tell your provider straight away and keep a record of any contact with them. Keep copies of evidence, like advertising materials or bills, that are important to your complaint.
If you have an issue with your mobile, broadband or landline service, report this to your provider and ask when it will be fixed. Most firms have a service status checker, so you can see if there’s a problem the provider knows about.
You could be entitled to compensation if there are issues with your broadband or landline service and your provider is part of the automatic compensation scheme.
If you get any calls, texts or emails you aren’t sure of, hang up or don’t reply. Be particularly careful if you’re asked to verify your account details by clicking on a link – this is an attempt to get your account details from you. You can check if your provider has contacted you by using the phone number you know is correct, or using their chat facility.
You should complain directly to your provider if you think it has misled you about what you thought you were getting, and include any evidence you’ve got to support your complaint.
You can report mis-selling to Ofcom, although it can’t investigate individual complaints. Misleading adverts can be flagged to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
