Aug 14

Survey: Most-Hated Wireless Company Isn’t ATT, It’s Sprint

Posted in: att, cellphones, research, Sprint, t-mobile, Today's Chili, verizon, Wireless

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Color us surprised. After hearing endless complaints about AT&T, especially in discussions of the iPhone, we had a hunch that the big A must be the most hated telecom company in the United States. A survey suggests otherwise.

Global marketing firm J.D. Power on Thursday released results of its wireless customer care survey, which graded telecom companies based on responses from 12,000 customers who contacted their carrier’s customer care department within the past year. Sprint received the lowest grade, scoring 704 out of 1,000 customer satisfaction points. AT&T scored slightly higher, with 730 points. Meanwhile, Verizon, Alltel and T-Mobile tied for first with 747 points.

The study rated customer satisfaction on how well wireless carriers could service their customers by phone, visits to a retail wireless store and on the web. (No, the firm did not poll AT&T customers about Apple’s ban of Google Voice apps for the iPhone.) That’s a small slice of what we consider to be “satisfaction” with a carrier, but too often we hear about AT&T iPhone customers complaining about spotty 3G network performance, dropped calls, poor quality, and the list goes on. (Here at Wired.com we’ve conducted two telecom studies of our own, and the numbers did not look pretty for AT&T.) We expected a lot of peeved AT&T customers to contact customer care to complain, only to be disappointed because most of these problems are network-related and thus not immediately resolvable.

Though the results are a little bland with three carriers tying for first, we find interesting the rather significant point difference between Sprint and the rest of the carriers, even AT&T. We just don’t often hear anyone talk about Sprint. Sprint customers out there: Is your experience really that bad?

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Chart: J.D. Power


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