5-17-2011Customer satisfaction with AT&T, T-Mobile drops

Sprint Nextel Corp., once dead last in customer satisfaction among the Big 4 national wireless carriers, now has the happiest subscribers, along with long-time leader Verizon Wireless, according to a survey released Tuesday.

ACSI gave AT&T a score of 66, down from 69 last year. It's the company's worst score since 2006, the year before it started carrying the iPhone. It's the lowest-ranked of the four national carriers after being surpassed by Sprint last year.

T-Mobile's score was 70, down from 73 points last year.

The very happiest wireless subscribers are those who get their service from smaller carriers like TracFone Wireless Inc. and U.S. Cellular Corp., according to ACSI. That category scored a 77 in the survey.

The survey was developed by the University of Michigan but is now run by a private company, ACSI LLC.

I am really surprised that Tracfone is listed as having great support. I used to get phones from them. I stopped about 4-5 years ago. It's not that the service was bad. It just wasn't all that great. Often it seemed that support was outsourced, it wasn't always easy to get answers to questions and the one time that I had a SIM card problem where the card needed to be replaced it took a number of frustrating calls until I got a person that was able to help me by sending out a new one. Perhaps the support is better now due to all of the competition.

I was a Sprint customer for over four years, and their customer service was usually very helpful.

Just this month, I actually switched to Virgin Mobile (which is owned by Sprint anyway) because they have a plan with unlimited data for $25, total. I'm finally part of the Android world, and loving it!

I'm using TracFone and and I dont have problem with their service.