Sky-Talk-Phone-Handset
Sky UK (Sky Broadband, Sky TV, Sky Mobile etc.) has confirmed that as many as 2,000 workers (7% of its total workforce) could be facing redundancy as part of a proposed plan to close three of its ten UK customer service centres, which reflects the company’s sites in Stockport, Sheffield and Leeds Central.
The change, which is said to have been prompted by changing consumer preferences (i.e. they’re focusing more on online messaging and emails) and declining call volumes (Sky expects this to decrease by a third in the next few years), will apparently also impact the company’s operations in Dunfermline and Newcastle too. But the details of the latter remain unclear and subject to consultation.
According to the Sky News report, Sky intends to try and mitigate against the impact of this by making a multi-million pound investment in its Livingston site to create a “centre of excellence” that can “deliver quicker, simpler and more digital customer service“.
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A Sky UK (Comcast) spokesperson said:
“We’re transforming our business to deliver quicker, simpler, and more digital customer service.
Our customers increasingly want choice, to speak to us on the phone when they need us most and the ease of managing everyday tasks digitally.
We’re investing in a new centre of excellence for customer service, alongside cutting-edge digital technology to make our service seamless, reliable, and available 24/7.
This is about building a future-ready Sky that continues to put our customers and their needs first.”
We tend to take the mention of a “more digital customer service” as meaning greater use of self-service online communications tools and AI style chatbots (something we’ve already seen other broadband and mobile operators adopt), although Sky’s announcement wasn’t terribly specific.
According to Ofcom’s figures for consumer complaints (example), Sky has consistently attracted some of the lowest complaint levels of all the industry’s major providers of broadband, phone, TV and mobile services. But this will also make it easy to spot if their customer support quality starts to decline post-closure. However, the regulator takes time to catch up with current events, which means we won’t start to see the first impacts from today’s news until late 2025 or early 2026.