OTT, pay-TV providers struggle with customer experience

OTT, pay-TV providers struggle with customer experience
Editor
| 26 July 2018

Cord-cutting is very much a thing but even those who do save money by abandoning pay-TV services are finding that the overall experience quality of services offered is less than satisfying, a survey by billing and customer relationship management (CRM) specialist Paywizard has found.
Paywizard 26July2018

In the survey of more than 3,000 consumers across the UK, US and the Philippines, consumers give higher negative ratings to traditional cable, satellite and IPTV pay-TV operators than over-the-top/subscription video-on-demand providers such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu at every stage of the customer journey. Yet it also revealed that the increasingly popular OTT and SVOD services also struggle to keep customers happy, receiving significant negative scores at each contact point in the customer journey.

Respondents to the survey gave OTT providers higher positive ratings in eight out of 10 categories: from making sign-up easy, to recommending content, to dealing with billing, to facilitating service cancellation. There were only two areas in which traditional operators perform better in consumer eyes than OTT rivals in terms of providing a positive experience: contacting customer service(58% versus 51%) and upgrading/downgrading their package (56% to 53%). UK consumers were the most favourable towards traditional pay-TV operators, rating them more highly for positive experiences than OTT services in four categories – compared with just two for the US and none for the Philippines.

The top three interactions identified as the most negative by customers for both traditional and OTT services were billing issues, with 26% of respondents unhappy about the way an inaccurate bill or payment problem was dealt with; cancelling a subscription (22%); and contacting customer service (21%).

Putting the findings of the survey into context, Paywizard chief executive Bhavesh Vaghela said: “This research looks at how consumers view their experiences with all pay-TV providers, touching on each decision moment in the customer journey. These decision moments are the key points at which the performance of an operator can determine how a customer views a service and whether their relationship with the provider will strengthen, weaken or even break.

"There is a perception in the TV market that OTT providers are performing much better than their traditional counterparts, however this research clearly demonstrates that OTT providers are far from perfect and are, in fact, only just better in many key areas of the customer journey. Traditional pay-TV providers have a lot of work to do to ensure a positive customer experience, and OTT services cannot take it for granted that their subscribers are happy at each point of consumer engagement.”

The full Show the Love with Customer Experience report from Paywizard is available from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]