Virgin Media becomes UK's least complained-about broadband provider

Virgin Media has hit a significant milestone - ranked as the UK's least complained-about broadband provider in Ofcom's latest quarterly data, with complaint levels at their lowest since records began.

Complaints have fallen by almost 50% over the past year, with Virgin Media also recording joint-lowest complaint levels for landline and pay TV.

The improvement coincides with a new certified training partnership with the Institute of Customer Service, aimed at strengthening how frontline agents handle complex and sensitive customer interactions.

Illustration: Choose.co.uk

Virgin Media reaches lowest complaint levels on record

Virgin Media has become the UK's least complained-about broadband provider, recording just 5 complaints per 100,000 customers in Ofcom's latest Q4 2025 figures - below the industry average of 7 and ahead of both Plusnet and Sky.

The result marks another shift in Ofcom's broadband complaints rankings, which have changed significantly over the past two years. Sky and EE historically dominated the top of the table for customer complaints performance, before Plusnet emerged as the sector's strongest performer through much of 2025. Virgin Media has now overtaken both.

The change is particularly notable given how sharply the wider rankings have moved in recent quarters. Ofcom's Q2 2025 figures showed EE generating the highest number of complaints across broadband, landline and pay TV services, while Plusnet recorded the fewest broadband complaints at the time.

Virgin Media's latest result continues a broader improvement trend for the provider, with complaint levels having fallen steadily over the past 18 months. The operator also matched its joint-lowest recorded complaint levels for both landline and pay TV services in the latest figures.

Across broadband more widely, Vodafone and TalkTalk generated the highest complaint volumes in Q4 2025, while faults, service issues and provisioning delays remained the biggest drivers of customer frustration across the sector.

The wider Ofcom dataset also showed total telecoms complaints rising for the first time since Q3 2023, driven primarily by mobile complaints following O2's October 2025 decision to increase its annual mid-contract price rise from £1.80 to £2.50 per month and apply the change to existing customers.

Inside Virgin Media O2's customer service overhaul

Virgin Media's improved position in Ofcom's data is the measurable result of a sustained operational programme that began in earnest in 2024 and accelerated through 2025.

Most recently, Virgin Media O2 has announced a new certified training partnership with the Institute of Customer Service, designed to help frontline agents better manage complex and sensitive customer interactions.

The programme focuses on practical customer service skills including emotional intelligence, empathy, complaint handling and understanding different customer behaviours and service styles. Virgin Media O2 says the first group of employees has already completed the training, with the scheme now being expanded across additional frontline teams and support partners.

The latest initiative builds on a broader customer service programme rolled out over the past 18 months that has reshaped how Virgin Media handles complaints, escalations and vulnerable customer support.

Across 2025, Virgin Media launched a specialist UK-based support team in Manchester to handle complex and sensitive cases, including bereavements, vulnerability issues and complaints that have escalated beyond standard resolution processes. The team is made up of around 500 agents across both Virgin Media broadband and O2 mobile services.

In July 2025, the operator launched Lumi AI - an internal system trained on millions of previous customer interactions that provides agents with real-time prompts, suggested resolutions and relevant customer information during calls.

Alongside these changes, Virgin Media O2 says it has cross-skilled around 5,000 agents, simplified internal support structures and improved call routing between teams - reducing customer transfers by around 1.3 million during 2025. The company says this has helped improve first-time resolution rates by 8%, while 70% of complaints are now resolved within 24 hours.

Virgin Media O2 has also introduced tools that automatically summarise conversations to reduce call handling times, as well as a partnership with Money Wellness aimed at improving support for financially vulnerable customers.

Why Virgin Media's turnaround matters

Virgin Media's movement from one of the UK's most complained-about broadband providers to the least complained-about major operator in under two years is not the kind of shift that typically happens through incremental improvement alone.

The scale of the operational changes introduced across 2024 and 2025 points to a much deeper investment in customer service infrastructure than the market would normally associate with routine complaints reduction programmes.

Previous responses to complaints spikes were often centred around staffing increases or targeted interventions. The current programme is broader. Virgin Media O2 has rebuilt parts of its customer service operation around specialist escalation teams, AI-assisted support tooling, cross-skilled agents, revised call routing systems and vulnerability-focused support structures - while continuing to invest heavily in network infrastructure at the same time.

That level of investment matters because complaints performance has historically been difficult for major providers to shift quickly at scale, particularly once reputational perceptions become established. The latest Ofcom data does not just show improvement - it shows Virgin Media overtaking providers that had largely dominated the top of the complaints rankings in recent years, including Sky and Plusnet.

The wider broadband market has also become noticeably more fluid. Sky and EE historically alternated near the top of the complaints tables, while recent quarters have seen EE fall sharply, Plusnet rise and Virgin Media now move into first place. The speed of those shifts suggests complaints performance may now be moving more dynamically than some of Ofcom's wider customer service reporting cycles were designed to track.

That could increasingly matter for consumers. Ofcom's broader Comparing Customer Service report - which measures satisfaction, complaint handling and first-contact resolution - moved to biennial publication in 2024. The most recent edition, published in 2025 using 2024 data, recorded Virgin Media below the industry average for complaint handling satisfaction - before many of the operational reforms now visible in the complaints data had fully taken effect.

Virgin Media's latest position matters beyond the rankings themselves. The scale and intensity of the company's customer service transformation suggests complaints performance is becoming strategically important in a way that goes beyond routine operational management.

Complaints rankings influence consumer trust, switching decisions and brand positioning across the sector. A provider moving from among the worst performers to the best in under two years changes competitive expectations for the wider market and increases pressure on rivals to improve their own service operations.

That shift also matters for regulation and consumer information. With complaints performance now shifting more rapidly between major providers, longer reporting cycles risk distorting consumer and market perceptions of provider performance by reflecting conditions that have already materially changed.