Customer service showdown: Sprint and Verizon tie for second, T-Mobile #1, AT&T last 32
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 8:25 am EDT 
Instead of relying on the horror stories and hearsay of others, Laptop Magazine decided that they wanted to test out the customer service of the big four American cellular carriers for themselves. So they set out on a trip across New York City, the phone lines, and the interwebs in an effort to gauge the parts of the carriers’ customer service departments that customers will interact with the most. In their surveying, Laptop Magazine visited two New York City stores for each carrier, called customer service once during the midday and once during the post-work ‘rush hour,’ and then got onto the carrier’s website to seek help. All the while they were attempting to solve problems with a BlackBerry from that carrier: setting up email, tethering, and internet radio.
So how did the carriers rank? Laptop Magazine has fairly extensive notes on each customer service experience they had, but what we find most interesting are the final results. The grades for the individual evaluations varied between a C- (AT&T phone support) and multiple A-, the overall grades ended up closely paralleling that spread. T-Mobile took the customer service crown with a composite score of A-, while Sprint and Verizon had to settle for sharing the second place medal after both solid B's. Poor AT&T, however, was levied with a aggregate C+, dragged down by scores of B- and below.
Thanks to Kevin for the tip!
32 Comments
I just picked up the Pre this Sunday and the Sprint employees where the most helpful and attentive as I have ever seen. BTW I love my Pre.
I went to the Sprint store yesterday to pick up a new Palm-Pre as my other was broken. I can honestly say I've never come across what can only be described as half wits. What a bunch of lazy, inattentive idiots. Not every single one, but in the repair center especially one girl would not even look at customers when she spoke to them. She was rude, flippant and quite honestly fat and disgusting as she sat there in her massive chair being an obnoxious twat. Her weight or appearance shouldn't have anything to do with it, but customer after customer she spoke to them like they were shit on her shoe. People who just wanted genuine help. When one guy retorted 'this is bull shit' she had the nerve to ask him to watch his language and then he walked off, she shouted after him, 'have a nice day sir.' Seriously, if I were him I would have reached through the stupid plastic screen she sits behind and strangled her.
I looked around and customers standing in line waiting to be served as the staff just stood around and chatted, not even acknowledging anyone who came to them for help.
Sprint if you're reading this, I'm talking about your store on 34th Street, New York. You need to have some serious words with these utter delinquents and give them a serious kick in the ass or start paying them higher wages so it at least looks like they half give a shit about their job and who they serve.
Yeah, service can vary a lot depending on who you get and how things are managed both on the phone and esp. at stores.
But when I read stories like these where people take offense without being proactive about it, I'm bothered, too. If you find someone like that, give Sprint a call about it or at least point it out to the store manager.
I say this mostly because what I see is an employed person who just doesn't seem to give a crap they're employed. Meanwhile I have dozens of close friends and relatives that are out of work right now who could do their job admirably.
Seems worth it to take the time to mention to managers if one gets exceptional service or exceptionally awful service. Otherwise, how can they know if they have a problem/strength? And then hopefully the next time you go back, things are a bit better, too.
Well said ananimus. As someone who's worked as a shift manager: sometimes the only way things can get changed is when customers complain and give tips. Wish management (or higher up the chain) could always know what's going on, but sometimes.. they don't. And I don't think they'll be trawling the comments here at PC either.
But having been for Sprint for the last 8 years I've always been disappointed with Sprint Customer service (over the phone). Still, the rates are reasonable and I'm usually able to negotiate a discount on top of that. Plus, the network really is good (in my area), never a dropped call. So despite the friendly, though undertrained and often incompetent, customer service reps I'm happy to stay with Sprint.
...and yeah, I love the Pre. As much as I've wanted an iPhone the last few years, I jsut can't justify the expense for AT&T's plans.
As a former AT&T customer, this is consistent with my experience. My experience w/Sprint customer service is better than w/AT&T customer service.
WOW...WTG Sprint! Still I cant see why TMobile gets such high marks. I cant stand TMobile service and really didnt see the big deal with their CS either when I went with a friend for his new phone (which BTW their phone selection stinks). ATT is definitely in the last spot for a reason. Their CS is in line with their prices, ever since they got the IPhone in their stores and acquired Cingular everything fell apart. They have high prices and pompus ***holes working their...hmm...reminds me of Apple...wonder why. Verizon really should be close to ATT in rank, I think the only thing keeping them afloat is that their network is rapidly growing which makes people happy to have coverage.
Being a 8 year Sprint customer now, I can say that Sprint CS has always been "ok", BUT now it is definitely a bit better. As someone stated above, you can get the few who dont care. As with every CS industry, you have people like that and on the flip side others that get taken advantage of daily from customers that just want new stuff for free even if they messed the phone up themselves. Within my 8 years, I can say that about 90% of the time I get good CS if not great CS from Sprint. From what I saw from customers at the TMobile store I visited, this was nto the case.
Way to go Sprint, keep up the good work, hope ot see you in the top spot hopefully soon!
After now 7 days without service bc T-Mobile's servers went down, and about 20 calls to their customer service, most of them being disconnected or having their customer service people tell me just bc I think they should have told us their system was down they obviously didn't think it was a good idea, etc.....I broke up with T-mobile. Most horrible service ever. I have to disagree with the article...I feel like just bc someone wants to be helpful, doesn't mean they actually are.
You probably should take their conclusions with a grain of salt. Visiting two stores, and making two phone calls, isn't a big enough sample to make any logical conclusion on customer service.
hmmm interesting. I think we need a recount. After t-mobile uses didn't have service for the entire weekend... Everywhere I went I heard someone on a phone cursing out a t mobile CSR. I agree, I don't think sprints CSR's are knowlegeble. you can totally tell that they're typing in ur quest and reading an answer from a computer. I'm pretty tech saavy so I remind them thatbive tied all I could and they are my last resort. I spend hours being on hold, transferred to a CSR to tech support, to advanced tech support, to having my call disconnected. Wtf? So I stopped calling in good news, sprint has the best phone plans! Which is why they keep my business.
Not long after Dan Hesse's appointment as ceo of Sprint in Dec '07, he recognized that improved customer service was one of their biggest needs. So that became the big focus of change more than a year ago. Although it takes time for perceptions on the street to change, I think most long-time customers can attest to an improved experience since. Sprint then lead the market in offering unlimited usage at a flat price. Now with them pushing fresh smartphone gear on WebOS, Android and WM coupled with the rollout of 4G, Hesse has seemingly engineered the turnaround of pretty big ship. Will they ever recover all that was lost during their years of drifting? Who knows. But kudos to the new guy at the helm.
Just my 2cents.
I definitely agree with this. Hesse has been making all the right moves as far as I can tell. Will that finally start to to stem the customer hemmorhaging (hopefully it maybe has already started to) and make investors happy eventually? Dunno, but at least they have someone competent who sees the big picture.
I haven't had much need to contact Sprint customer care until I purchased my Pre on June 6th. Since then, for various reasons, I've had 3 or 4 experiences with telephone customer service. Each experience has been exceptional in terms of willingness to listen to my description of the issue and then taking action for resolution. My last experience was yesterday when I called to ask about status of my Airave backorder. Even though the call was dropped twice, the rep called back immediately each time. When the call dropped the third time (see why I need an Airave?), the rep left me a voice mail message with the specifics of the status and 5 minutes later called my land-line with the same information. No complaints here.
i used to work for tmobile. they have horrible coverage in most places outside of large population centers.
Too bad T-Mobile has terrible coverage here in Northern VA. I think you're going to experience a lot of halfwits, as pexton would say, at every store of every carrier. Sprints rates and service can't be beat IMO.
I've had good and bad customer service from Sprint, but that is all companies across the board. Their service has improved vastly and getting better by the day. Most of your sales people are given their compensation based on their reviews from their customers, that is why they always tell you "if someone calls from Sprint please rate me". I have always had great response if I ever did have to call in and report bad customer service. So, if you've had bad customer service please take it to the source and not blast people or stores on here personally........that's just rude!
I agree with MRand86 above; visiting two stores and making a couple of phone calls is mathematically insignificant.
I would take that a step further and say that this shows a huge bias to those living/working in NYC. How about the other 98% of the country? PreCentral, you are doing a disservice to real journalism by advancing this story as news, as opposed to a very small, insignificant opinion of a very small group of people. Ironically, that was the conjecture that they were making: that they wanted to rely NOT on anecdotal evidence, but instead, do real research. That's fine. Do the research. Let us know what you find when you have sampled a large enough population to draw conclusions.
I agree with the idea it's a small sample size, but let me explain why NYC might be used.
1) It's populous, which means that all carriers offer service, all have stores, and they probably have larger "flagship" type stores. I think if they only had limited resources to collect data, doing to Podunk, KS, or Backwater, MS would not be a good use of time and money. This was clearly an informal test.
2) Because most of the freakin media in the US is in NY, many magazines are headquartered there, it makes sense that if you have a few editors or writers doing a project for a week while juggling other things that it would be in NY. Why spend money flying them to Sioux City South Dakota (or is it Iowa) when they can choose any of probably 20 t-mobile stores, and 100 verizon stores in the metro NY area. Can they do that in Sioux City?
Anyway, this was an informal survey, in the hands of a 3rd party. Most people are bitter when they have a problem, they have an axe to grind. I trust PC mag, more than some disgruntled customer. Besides, I think all customer service sucks with cell carriers. They have you locked into a contract, they can tell you to f'off and you can't do a thing about it.
Just as a disclaimer, I neither live or work in NYC.
I have been with T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint. I have to say that customer service for Sprint has been the best so far. T-Mobile was very good, but they didn't have any phones I liked. Verizon was the worst, I had their package deal and I hated calling them for support so I dumped them and I will never go back.
worked for tmobile for a year, customer service was second to none, but it had to be because the coverage was so limited. worked for sprint for four years, customer service was horrible because there were unintended disincentives in place.
it is important to note that historically store reps were not considered customer service reps, but pure sales people. helping a 100 people in a day resolve issues meant nothing if you did not sale something. customers would come to me to resolve there issues, but then go to another rep/store/telesales to make a purchase. or worse, they would refer their friends to have me correct their issues, but not refer friends who were looking to buy.
so reps quickly learned not to waste time on service because there was little to now compensation involved. those that have mentioned hesse are right. he has gotten rid of these disincentives. it is a lot better now. and friends that i still have working there feel a lot better about things as well. it's a lot less cut-throat from what i'm hearing.
I disagree with MRand86 and Ytalian. it's important to retain a professional attitude across the board. Every single sales and client services representative! If I had phoned four separate companies providing a similar service and asked who could give me the best 'deal' the attitude of the service counts for a lot when it comes to make a purchasing decision.
Look at Virgin Airlines and the case of the complaint letter that circled the internet like wild fire after a disturbing incident on a flight from India to the UK. http://www.beersteak.com/breaking-news/hilarious-complaint-letter-from-v... It's a hilarious letter yes, but I wonder how many people thought twice about booking a flight on that route after reading this. All it takes is one sh*t experience and you can bring a company down signfitcantly.
Ceo's, managers and the like need to shape up and realize that these stores, the help lines etc need to provide excellent service everytime while not cutting corners or costs by outsourcing call enters to India and the like where people read from script further infuriating the consumer. I'm not saying they are bad people, but are being exploited just like us. They also need to ensure staff and managers in stores are friendly, attentive, professional and knowledgeable.
I have this crazy idea about starting a consumer group that people join to boycott phone companies, banks and the like until they give us the service we deserve and pay for. A consumerist mini-revolution if you will. I'm from the UK and I am amazed how expensive phone companies here charge. I might be wrong, but isn't it the highest in the world? And for what exactly? To be spoken to like an idiot? For 'job worths' to ignore you until they can be bothered to give you the slightest bit of attention?
Anyone here who is complacent enough to say, 'Well you can't judge a whole company's customer service on 3 or 4 bad experiences'. F**k that! People like you are allowing this to happen. You're letting them get away with it because of this attitude you have. Meanwhile they continue to rip us off with their extortionate charges as the directors and CEO's line their pockets with your hard earned cash.
Stand up for yourself! Write a complaint letter. Complain to the relevant authorities each and every time it happens. Persevere until you get something back in return whether that be free services or a genuine apology and lets not hear silly excuses again. The one day, maybe one day we'll win this ridiculous sham we call 'Customer Service'
My Wife and I have Sprint and my kids have T-Mobile. T-mobile sales staff are friendly and willing to help within their limitations. But have a problem with your phone that is not solved with a sim card replacement,the solutions are quite poor. Call Customer Service, wait, argue, talk. It's a long process that ends with them sending you a phone in a week. Been through it. And now their whole system is down and they don't bother to tell anyone? If Sprint did that, they would be crucified!
I prefer walking into the Sprint store, drop the phone off, come back in an hour and have it fixed or replaced. My experience with Sprint has been pretty good, despite all the horror stories. And I have been a customer for over 15 years.
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I need some help from anybody. I just recently installed Preware and everything was working great(installing patches, themes, and apps), until I installed the message notification patch. I didn't like it so I removed it(restarted Pre of course)but for some reason it was still playing the ringer I used when I had the patch installed, then it got worse, the notification ringer wouldn't play at all(sms messages, emails). So after 2 restarts I was forced to do a partial erase, after it rebooted, the theme, and other patches I had installed were still on my Pre(Shouldn't they have been removed?). So I reinstalled Preware but now I don't have the option to select "available patches" and my installed patches aren't listed either, even when I try to view them through WebOSQuickInstall. Can anybody help me solve this problem? Do you think WebOSDoctor is necessary? Thank
You!
I think the best thing to do is sacrifice one of your loved ones to the Gods. That worked for me.
Darn!
I deal with Sprint through the chat feature. So much less aggravating.
I've generally had good experiences with Sprint. With very advanced tech problems, the only help I've ever gotten is A) getting elevated to better tech support (takes a while), or B) go see my one local Sprint store guy who's as much a geek about smartphone tech as I am (except he can tinker on Sprint's end). Anyone else and it's entirely hit-or-miss.
But otherwise, with any account issues, they've always been happy, willing and able to help me out so long as I'm a little patient.
Actually had a really cute chat with one of their agents once. To wrap things up I asked where her support center was. Of course it was miles away, so we both just chuckled and said, "Well that's a shame." But wouldn't that be a hell of a way to meet someone.
What I'm saying is that you can't draw conclusions from statistically unsound data. To be more reliable, they should have at least done more tests. By only doing two, each result has too much influence on the overall result. Also, you can't speak on the national state of anyone's customer service if your sample is from one area. Your results would be relative to wherever you took the sample from.
I've been a Sprint customer for almost five years when I got my first phone as a present, and I can honestly say that it's quite rare when I get bad customer service. For the most part, they've been nothing but nice and courteous and if my phone has a problem, they either fix it or replace it with no fuss. I can't complain, besides the fact that their data plans are incredibly cheap.
Im a sprint customer now.
Oh gosh, but when i got my touch pro 2 unlocked at verizon, what a funny day =]
So i hand the rep my phone (a 20-22 year old) and after listening to the phone (for instructions probobly) for about 5 minutes she go cracking. She took my old phone, and then attemped to find the wire to connect them to a computer. After trying for another 5 minutes she called a manager, who kindly pointed out that the cable she required was on the desk she was working on. After connecting them she proceeded to go into the back room and replace my battery with an old one. When I kindly pointed out that i had marked the battery with a pen, she scrambled back and forth, saying she got the batteries mixed up. I recieved my phone back with the battery cover half off half on.
great service verizon. great service.
Im a sprint customer now.
Oh gosh, but when i got my touch pro 2 unlocked at verizon, what a funny day =]
So i hand the rep my phone (a 20-22 year old) and after listening to the phone (for instructions probobly) for about 5 minutes she go cracking. She took my old phone, and then attemped to find the wire to connect them to a computer. After trying for another 5 minutes she called a manager, who kindly pointed out that the cable she required was on the desk she was working on. After connecting them she proceeded to go into the back room and replace my battery with an old one. When I kindly pointed out that i had marked the battery with a pen, she scrambled back and forth, saying she got the batteries mixed up. I recieved my phone back with the battery cover half off half on.
great service verizon. great service.