It's Official, Everybody Hates AT&T

There’s a new Consumer Reports survey out that ranks cellphone companies by customer satisfaction, and to pretty much no one’s surprise, AT&T comes in last in all 19 cities surveyed. (Verizon came in first.) As AllThingsD notes, the survey “suggests that AT&T’s shortcomings are more widespread than the carrier would have us believe and not simply the product of a high concentration of iPhones in the country’s larger cities.”

With low marks for several key indicators of customer satisfaction-including service availability, circuit capacity, dropped-call frequency and voice service-across 73 percent of the markets Consumer Reports surveyed, it’s pretty clear that AT&T has become overextended by the popularity of the iPhone.

Well surely this will serve as a wake-up call to AT&T, right? Nope. They responded to AllThingsD with the most awful marketing speak you can imagine, saying they appreciate the feedback but that it’s from a self-selected group of respondents and purely anecdotal. Even more important, they note, “Without question the surest indication of customer satisfaction is churn, or turnover. For the last quarter, our postpaid churn was just 1.17 percent.” Interesting, because I thought putting everyone into contract was responsible for reducing churn.


“AT&T Ranked Last in Consumer Reports’ Best Cellphone Service Survey” [AllThingsD via MocoNews]

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