Talk Talk chief executive Dido Harding tells Andrew Cave how the group is cutting complaints and moving on from its record Ofcom fine.

The next time you're angrily berating broadband and fixed line telecoms provider Talk Talk for its customer services problems, you may end up with the chief executive on the line. "It always freaks them out in the call centres," Dido Harding confides. "It's usually when the agent is trying really hard with a problem that they just can't fix.

"I whisper to the agents and ask them to put the customer on hold and say they're going to pass the call to their manager. Then I say that I'm the chief executive and I want to explain what's going on and see what I can do. It has the most brilliant impact." This little trick hasn't stopped Talk Talk – neck-and-neck with Virgin Media as Britain's second largest broadband provider behind BT – from being castigated for appalling customer service.

Earlier this month, the company, which has 4.8m customers, 3,500 staff, 14 contact centres and receives 350,000 calls to its offices every week, was fined a record £3m by the telecoms regulator Ofcom for "breaching consumer rules", while a national newspaper gave Talk Talk its wooden spoon award for the worst customer service in the UK last......Read more on this story---> Talk Talk chief executive Dido Harding says group is ready to listen to its customers