TalkTalk has lost nearly 300,000 customers since data breach

Seven per cent of company's broadband base has left since data breach, finds Kantar Worldpanel ComTech

UPDATED:

TalkTalk has claimed that it has lost 101,000 customers since it was hit by a cyber attack in October.

The firm also said the attack has cost it in the region of £60m so far. The full story can be found here.

INITIAL STORY:

TalkTalk has lost nearly 300,000 customers since it was hit by a crippling cyber-attack in which it admitted that 156,959 customer accounts were compromised.

The attack, which involved a combination of a SQL injection crack and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, enabled hackers to access customer information and temporarily take down TalkTalk's website for two days.

Since then, the company has lost many of its existing customers in the fourth quarter of 2015, with seven per cent of its broadband base - or around 300,000 customers - dumping TalkTalk in favour of a different provider, according to research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Imran Choudhary, consumer insight director at the research firm, said that BT appeared to be the biggest winner, picking up as many as 40 per cent of the customers who left TalkTalk. "Customers have lost faith in TalkTalk as a trustworthy brand," he said.

TalkTalk also saw its share of the home services market fall by 4.4 percentage points, quarter-on-quarter, in terms of new customers - only 1.4 per cent of whom gave reliability as a reason for joining the provider in the last three months, which Choudhary said was well below the market average.

He said there was no doubt that TalkTalk also lost potential customers following the attack, and that if the company was to recover from recent events, it would need to offer more than just good value. Its latest marketing campaign involves offering broadband free to new customers.

For TalkTalk, though, the news has gone from bad to worse: last week, workers at one of its outsourced call centres in India were arrested over allegations of security breaches involving customer records.

Police in India arrested three employees of contractor Wipro who were accused of stealing customer data, which was then subsequently used in a bid to scam customers.

The arrests were the culmination of a year or more of complaints from TalkTalk customers over phone calls from scammers who were able to quote account numbers and other details that only an insider would be able to access.