top of page

Nordic Telecom Customer Satisfaction 2026: Where Established Operators Lose Customers

8 hours ago
6 min read
Two smiling coworkers in white shirts check a phone outside a modern office building, one holding a laptop and bag.

Table of contents:


The 2026 telecom customer satisfaction studies from EPSI Rating and Svenskt Kvalitetsindex (SKI) for Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark are out. For anyone running customer service, CX or network operations at a Nordic operator, they are the year’s most important external benchmark.


Read together, the four reports tell one story. Networks are better than ever, yet satisfaction is flat or falling. Operators no longer win or lose on coverage maps and megabits. They win or lose in the moments when something goes wrong: a disruption, a chatbot that can’t help, a price change nobody explained.



The 2026 Nordic Telecom Customer Satisfaction picture at a glance

Market

Mobile, consumers 2026

Change vs 2025

Highest-rated (consumers)

Biggest friction point

🇸🇪 Sweden

66.2

+0.4

Fello, 81.0

Proactivity and disruption handling

🇳🇴 Norway

72.5

−1.2

OneCall, 79.2

Chatbots and digital self-service

🇫🇮 Finland

67.2

−5.6

Moi, 79.0

A 19-point gap between best and worst

🇩🇰 Denmark

73.7

−1.6

CBB, 79.3

Falling loyalty and unmet expectations

Sources: SKI Mobil 2026, EPSI Norway Mobile 2026, EPSI Finland Mobile 2026, EPSI Denmark Telecom 2026. EPSI and SKI scores are customer satisfaction indices on a 0–100 scale. Below 60 indicates serious difficulty retaining customers; above 75 indicates a strong customer relationship.


The expectation gap: better networks, flat satisfaction


Sweden shows the pattern most clearly. Consumers and business customers both gave higher ratings for coverage, speed and stability this year. Even so, consumer satisfaction rose only marginally, from 65.8 to 66.2, and the business market held at 67.0. SKI’s explanation: customers see the improvements but now judge operators against a higher standard (SKI Mobil 2026).


Finland reports the same shift from the other direction. EPSI notes that network performance, mobile data and digital services have become baseline expectations. They are necessary, but they no longer set an operator apart (EPSI Finland Mobile 2026).


When the technical baseline is met, the customer judges the rest of the relationship.



Price wins the trial, not the relationship


Challenger and digital brands top the consumer rankings in all four countries: Fello in Sweden (81.0), OneCall in Norway (79.2), Moi in Finland (79.0) and CBB in Denmark (79.3). It is tempting to put this down to price-hunting customers who never call support. The 2026 data does not support that explanation.


Finland has the clearest evidence, because it has two challengers with opposite results. Newcomer Oomi Mobiili scores 76.5. Giga Mobiili scores 60.1, and roughly a third of its customers are considering switching within a year. The difference is not price. Oomi outscores Giga by 18.4 points on ease of doing business and by 23.0 points on customer loyalty. Moi tops the market on product quality, value for money, loyalty and ease of doing business. It also scores 82.8 for customer service against an industry average of 72.8 (EPSI Finland Mobile 2026).


Norway shows how quickly a price-led win can unravel. 14% of mobile customers have been with their current provider for less than a year. Among new customers recruited by telemarketing, up to half are already considering switching again. EPSI concludes that operators need to invest more in onboarding and follow-up after the sale (EPSI Norway Mobile 2026).


In Denmark, price is still the top purchase criterion for 76% of consumers, but that share fell 4 percentage points since 2025. Meanwhile, customer service, digital self-service and bundling are growing in importance (EPSI Denmark Telecom 2026).

Customers aren’t rejecting support. They are rejecting friction.



Where the friction sits: market by market


🇸🇪 Sweden: the proactivity gap

Consumers who contacted their operator gave better ratings this year for response times, treatment and the help they received. Proactivity and feeling valued as a customer remain weak. SKI’s conclusion is that resolving a ticket when the customer calls is no longer enough. Operators need to anticipate the customer’s situation and offer solutions before problems arise (SKI Mobil 2026). Disruptions are where the relationship is tested hardest:

  • Mobile: About a quarter of business customers experienced outages or disruptions in the past year. Information during the disruption, time to fix and follow-up afterwards all scored clearly lower than everyday technical quality (SKI Mobil 2026).

  • Broadband: Business satisfaction fell from 69.0 to 66.8. Just over a third of business customers had a disruption, and they are about 15 index points less satisfied than those who didn’t. Follow-up is the lowest-rated part of the experience (SKI Broadband 2026).


🇳🇴 Norway: the chatbot backlash

Norwegian mobile customers remain broadly satisfied. The study still delivers a clear warning about digital service: 52% of consumers are negative to operators using chatbots, and only 18% are positive. Customers who have used a chatbot also rate the operator’s availability lower. Around four in five consumers use digital self-service, but those solutions are rated lower than a few years ago (EPSI Norway Mobile 2026).



🇫🇮 Finland: the great divide

Satisfaction fell in both segments: consumers from 72.8 to 67.2, business customers from 72.3 to 68.0. The average hides a split market, with almost 19 points between the highest- and lowest-rated operators in the consumer market. Elisa recorded the largest change, down 11.0 points among consumers (to 60.0) and 10.6 points among business customers (to 60.8).


On the business side, Telia leads with 73.4. Only 9% of its business customers are considering switching, against an industry average of 18%. EPSI also notes that customers’ perception of operator initiative is weakening across the market (EPSI Finland Mobile 2026).


🇩🇰 Denmark: from “very satisfied” to “satisfied”

Mobile satisfaction fell 1.6 points to 73.7. That moves the average Danish mobile customer from “very satisfied” to “satisfied”. Loyalty to mobile operators dropped 2.5 points, and operators met customer expectations less well than last year (74.2, down 1.5). Telenor and YouSee broke the trend and improved (EPSI Denmark Telecom 2026).



The AI paradox: easy to use, can’t solve the problem


The most important finding for anyone investing in AI-driven support appears in several countries at once.


In Sweden, SKI finds that AI-based help has become easier to use but still doesn’t always solve the customer’s problem all the way. A smooth entry point also has to lead to an actual resolution (SKI Mobil 2026). Finland’s broadband study puts numbers on the same gap. Consumers rate AI services 68.7 for ease of use but only 55.9 for problem solving. For business customers the figures are 74.3 and 63.7. The gap has persisted in every year since 2024 (EPSI Finland Broadband 2026). In Norway, chatbot users rate availability lower, and a majority are negative to chatbots altogether (EPSI Norway Mobile 2026).


The problem isn’t the interface. It’s what the AI knows. A bot that can’t see a mast outage in the customer’s area, or a faulty home router, can only send the customer through a generic troubleshooting tree.



Closing the gap: what established operators can do


Established operators run complex portfolios, legacy systems and large support organizations. They cannot become a lightweight challenger overnight. But the friction points in the 2026 reports — disruption handling, proactivity and AI that can’t resolve — have a shared root cause: network reality and customer service are disconnected.


  • Give AI and self-service the context they lack. Real-time network and device data lets a bot or app know immediately whether the customer is affected by a known outage or a malfunctioning router. Customers get a specific answer instead of a troubleshooting script.

  • Act before the customer calls. Identifying which customers are affected by a network degradation, and telling them proactively what is happening and when it will be fixed, addresses exactly what Swedish customers rate lowest: information, time to fix and follow-up.

  • Give frontline agents the same view as the NOC. When an agent can see the quality of experience of the subscriber they’re talking to, more issues are solved at first contact without escalating to second-line support.


This is what Subtonomy’s technical customer support portfolio is built for: connecting network data to every customer-facing channel.

The operators that lead the 2027 reports won’t necessarily have the cheapest gigabytes. They will be the ones that respect their customers’ time, anticipate network issues and give their AI and their agents the context to actually solve problems.





Frequently asked questions


Which Nordic mobile operators had the most satisfied consumers in 2026?

Fello in Sweden (81.0), OneCall in Norway (79.2), Moi in Finland (79.0) and CBB in Denmark (79.3).

It fell in Finland (−5.6), Denmark (−1.6) and Norway (−1.2), and rose marginally in Sweden (+0.4), even though customers rated technical quality higher.

In Norway, 52% of mobile consumers are negative to operator chatbots and 18% are positive. In Finland, broadband customers rate AI services as easy to use but much weaker at solving their problem. Swedish mobile customers report the same pattern.


Sources

bottom of page