Running more of a marathon than a dash, Sprint Nextel Corp. has caught its top customer satisfaction rival in a national survey of wireless users.
The Overland Park-based wireless carrier overcame its also-ran status from three years ago to stand alongside Verizon Wireless. They tied for top score, 72 out of 100, in Tuesday’s release of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
Sprint’s strong showing marks a shift in the company’s attention to its customers’ experience. Three years ago, the focus was on fixing problems with billing, dropped calls and other issues that had pushed Sprint’s ratings below its competitors. wholesale electronics suppliers
Now it’s working to improve on its widely recognized service quality.
“As we’ve gone literally from worst to first in many of these competitive benchmarks … it’s going to be more difficult because our performance has gotten so good,” said Bob Johnson, chief service officer.
Sprint’s improved score was only two points ahead of last year.
The company had posted enormous gains in the 2009 and 2010 surveys, years in which its score jumped more than 10 points each year from a rock-bottom 56 in 2008.
Sprint’s improvements have boosted its rankings in other customer-focused surveys. wholesale Android Tablets
In February, the company won a J.D. Power 2011 Customer Service Champion award in a broader survey of customer satisfaction. An April survey by Vocalabs put Sprint in a virtual tie with T-Mobile and AT&T Inc. in their handling of customer care calls.
In the recent ACSI survey, Sprint was the only major carrier to post an increase from last year, gaining two points while Verizon lost one.
T-Mobile USA fell three points to 70 and AT&T Inc. again finished lowest among the major four, falling three points to 66.
ACSI LLC, which surveyed 8,000 households during the first quarter, reported that T-Mobile’s score was within the three-point margin of error from the two leaders.
AT&T’s score was its worst since 2006, the year before it launched the wildly popular iPhone, ACSI said.
Verizon now also offers the iPhone and rumors are that Sprint may get it soon, too. A Sprint spokeswoman declined to comment on those rumors.
AT&T may find a silver lining in its slipping customer service rankings. Better customer service is one of the reasons it wants to acquire T-Mobile in a controversial $39 billion deal.
AT&T has said the merger would help it solve service problems related to high volumes of data traffic over its iPhones, tablet computers and other devices.
The company also said that buying T-Mobile would instantly provide the additional wireless capacity, increased cell tower density and broader network infrastructure to improve call quality and other service improvements.
ACSI read the survey results differently.
“It is common to find a reduction in customer satisfaction after mergers, but it is rare for customer satisfaction to drop ahead of a merger,” ACSI founder Claes Fornell said in the announcement of scores. “Assuming the deal is approved, it remains to be seen if a much larger AT&T can regain the strength of its customer relationships.”
Sprint has challenged the merger as anti-competitive, anti-innovation and bad for consumers.
Customers looking for still greater satisfaction might consider all their options.
ACSI gave its best score in the wireless category, a 77, to “All others.”
This is a compilation score for several smaller carriers that includes TracFone and U.S. Cellular. The surveyors said that they don’t have enough data to provide individual scores for these companies.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse made “improved customer experience” one of the company’s three goals when he became top officer in December 2007. At the company’s shareholders meeting last week, he noted significant gains as part of an overall turnaround plan.
“Everybody in the company understands that they have a role in improving the customer experience because Dan (Hesse) as the CEO has set that as the priority,” Johnson said.
At the shareholders meeting, Hesse had said better customer care has bolstered gains in the other two priorities he set.
It has rebuilt Sprint’s badly damaged brand, which had been a victim of the 2005 merger with Nextel Partners. Sprint’s improved brand, in turn, has begun to attract new customers, nearly 3 million in six months. And the added customers have helped Sprint generate the cash it needs to operate, pay its debts and invest in its network.
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