BT has beaten its own target by adding a record number of customers to its television sports channel in the last quarter.

The telecoms giant, publishing figures a day after its £12.5 billion acquisition of EE was approved by the competition authorities, also reported that it now has 200,000 mobile customers.

Gavin Patterson, Chief Executive, said the company was tackling customer complaints by introducing new measures to fix faults more quickly and it is creating jobs in call centres to deal with enquiries more efficiently.

Pre-tax profit on an adjusted basis rose 5% to £1.4bn on a 1% decline in revenue to £8.7bn. The company declared a 14% rise in the interim dividend to 4.4p.

Ccommenting on the results, Mr Patterson (right) said: “We’ve delivered a good financial performance with revenue up 2% this quarter.

“Fibre broadband is a success story and we continue to invest heavily to help the UK remain a broadband leader among major European nations.  Our open access fibre network now passes 24 million premises and we are not stopping there.  

“We want to get fibre broadband to as many people as possible and we are also pushing ahead with our plans to get ultrafast broadband to ten million premises by the end of 2020.  Market-wide demand for fibre remains strong with fibre net additions up 21% as we hit the five million milestone for homes and businesses connected.

“We’ve seen good demand for BT Sport Europe and this has helped us add a record number of BT TV customers in the quarter.  Its contribution has been better than we expected, helping drive a 7% increase in BT Consumer revenue.  

“Mobile is another growth area and I am pleased our consumer customer base now stands at more than 200,000.  And I am also pleased that yesterday, the Competition and Markets Authority provisionally approved our planned acquisition of EE, unconditionally without remedies.

“We are making step changes to improve customer service, as part of our group-wide programme.  Openreach’s recently launched ‘View my Engineer’ service is going down well.  The 3,000 engineers we hired in the last 18 months are helping us fix faults faster and provide new services sooner.  

“We have also created more than 1,000 new contact centre jobs in the UK, with hundreds more to come, to meet our 2016 commitment for more than 80% of consumer customer calls to be answered in the UK.  And we have plans to go even further in years to come.

“Our strategy is delivering and our results show we’re on track to achieve our outlook for the year.”