Brightview unhappy with BBC’s Watchdog Broadband survey

The parent company of a number of popular ISPs has criticised the BBC’s Watchdog programme over its interpretation of information relating to customer satisfaction with Internet Service Providers.

Brightview owns a number of internet service providers (ISPs), including Global Internet, Waitrose.com, and Madasafish. The company claims that the BBC based its results, and the focus of its programme, on the volume of voters in a customer satisfaction survey, which made the bigger companies look better as they had more customer that were able to vote.

The programme focussed heavily on the larger ISPs such as BT that have a far larger customer base. BT was said to have received the highest number of positive votes from customers, but Brightview officials state that this is because the company is so large and therefore has more customers to vote. Brightview’s ISPs all achieved over ninety percent satisfaction in the survey, but because the customer base is smaller this was barely acknowledged.

The Chief Executive of Brightview stated: "Basing the programme's results on volume of voters was the supreme example of the BBC's ineptitude at managing a very important survey on broadband providers. As Britain's leading consumer affairs programme, it is Watchdog's duty to inform the consumer, but by telling viewers that the "best" provider of broadband also features as one of the worst, it only confused the issue and failed to make use of some valuable consumer data. The BBC's ridiculous handling of the survey did nothing to reflect customer opinion, and misled consumers into believing that a provider which achieved a customer satisfaction significantly below average is the best."

Yvan Bamping, spokesperson for Broadband Review site http://www.broadband-expert.co.uk echoed Brightviews’s sentiments stating that, “these figures could be misleading to those who have not seen the whole program or if they are taken out of context”.

In response, a BBC spokesperson said: “I'm delighted our survey has provoked such interest, but sorry that Brightview appear to have missed the part of the programme where we highlighted the performance of both Global Internet and Waitrose.com. We were very clear in how we presented our results, which were not intended to be treated as a statistical analysis, but as the personal views of the 50,000 viewers who chose to take part.”