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The Institute of Customer Service (ICS) has today published their first biannual UK Customer Satisfaction Index for 2026 (January), which reveals that Tesco Mobile was – for the second consecutive report – the only mobile and broadband (telecoms) provider to make it into their table of the country’s top 50 organisations. But both Virgin Mobile and Three UK were still named among the most improved.
The research typically reflects the results from a large online survey of over 15,000 customers – balanced to be representative of the UK adult population, which asked each of them about their experiences across hundreds of different organisations and market sectors (a total of 59,500 responses were gathered). This was then used to produce a score out of 100 for each organisation.
Overall, the “Telecommunications & Media” sector reported another improvement in its general ranking since the last report in July 2025, with average customer satisfaction rising to a score of 76 out of 100 (up from 74.4 in July 2025 and 73.3 in Jan 2025). The number of customers in the same sector who feel the organisation they dealt with cares about them as a customer has also increased to 63.7% (up from 59.5% in Jan 2025).
The good news is that the only telecoms operator to make the top 50 companies table, Tesco Mobile, did improve their ranking from 9th place in July 2025 to 8th place today. The operator’s score also improved from 82.5 to 85.3 over the same time period. Take note that the limited sample size means that some highly rated telecoms providers simply didn’t receive enough feedback to be included into the top table.
Elsewhere, the UKCSI also named two telecoms providers in their top 20 table of the “most improved organisations“, including Virgin Mobile on a score of 76.3 (up from 70 in Jan 2025) and Three UK on a score of 77.3 (up from 71.8 over the same period). The inclusion of Virgin Mobile is a little bit odd as they no longer exist as a standalone brand and most customers were moved on to O2’s plans some 2-3 years ago.
