The industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) has issued a progress update on its work to support Ofcom’s new One Touch Switching (OTS) system, which started to go live last month and aims to make it easier for consumers to change broadband ISP. A total of 100,000 switch orders have been placed since launch, albeit with only 32,000 successful completions.
Progress is clearly being made, with 265 brands (i.e. internet providers and related companies) now live on the messaging platform and the switch match success rate reaching 60% this week. But TOTSCo acknowledges that it still needs to improve the success rate of the “matching process” (i.e. ensuring that customer switches are correctly verified and migrated between ISPs) before the backup is removed on the 24th October 2024. Ofcom required ISPs to maintain the old migration process until that date, as a fallback for switching failures.
The regulator recently drafted in the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) to help “coordinate and facilitate industry efforts“, not least by helping to identify the sources of the remaining issues and get them resolved before the deadline (here).
Paul Bradbury, TOTSCo’s CEO, said:
We’re now into the third week of One Touch Switch (OTS) operations, with over 70 brands placing a total of 100,000 switch orders, resulting in more than 32,000 successful completions. This upward trend is highly encouraging and signals strong progress towards achieving full adoption of OTS for all switches in the coming weeks.
With over 265 brands now live and a switch match success rate at 60%, our focus remains firmly on helping the industry achieve full OTS adoption. Meetings have already begun as part of the ‘matching improvement activities’ outlined in Ofcoms open letter to the OTA2, and we are actively supporting these efforts. We are also working closely with the OTA2 to publish key lessons learned from this exercise as soon as possible.
As I have mentioned previously, we are seeing a number of issues that can be easily resolved by following the best practice guides.
At least one of the remaining problem areas could potentially be linked to TOTSCo’s move to offload their telephone support and backend to India, which some ISPs have told us has resulted in various problems with the new call centre staff struggling to understand many of their requests or being unable to help.
Otherwise, readers can see how the matching process is gradually improving here, and the hope is that they’ll be achieving a success rate of 100% or thereabouts before the deadline.