TELECOMS firm Orange has come top in a customer satisfaction league for the fourth year running - thanks to its North-East workforce.

Orange, which employs 5,500 staff at call centres in Darlington, County Durham, Peterlee, East Durham, and Tyneside, topped an annual survey by JD Power and Associates.

The survey rated all four networks in the highly competitive and rapidly expanding mobile phone market.

Orange was the most praised network when it came to the handling of customer calls and complaints from both contract and pre-pay customers.

Staff deal with hundreds of thousands of calls from customers each week, with the Darlington site handling an average 367,000 calls.

The internationally-recognised JD Power Mobile Customer Satisfaction survey also found that Orange customers were most likely to recommend the company to a friend.

Seventy nine per cent of pre-pay customers - those who pay for their calls as they make them - said they would do so.

This compares with 67 per cent of Vodafone pre-pay customers, 67 per cent of BT Cellnet and 52 per cent of One 2 One customers.

Orange, floated by parent company French Telecom earlier this year, doubled its customer numbers in the past 12 months, adding more than five million new users to its brand.

It also signed a deal last month with cable company ntl, to provide mobile services to its three million residential customers.

John Allwood, executive vice-president of Orange UK, said: "In the past two years we have changed hands three times - acquired by Mannesmann and now by France Telecom.

"But in that time we have never lost sight of our first priority - serving our customers.

"However, we are not complacent, and recognise that we must work harder every year to retain our position in a fiercely competitive industry.

"The JD Power survey is recognised globally, and with our growing international presence this makes us especially proud to receive this accolade."

The award comes on top of Orange being named network of the year in the annual What Cellphone magazine survey.

The survey highlighted the company's innovation, customer service and quality in the UK market, where more than 43 million people own a mobile phone.