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AT&T Repeats As Lowest-Rated Wireless Carrier
redletterdave writes "Consumer Reports' latest ratings survey of cell phone carriers revealed that Verizon Wireless scored the highest satisfaction score out of the four major U.S. service providers, earning particularly high grades for texting and data service. Verizon was followed closely by Sprint and T-Mobile USA, but all three companies earned scores lower overall than their figures from last year. AT&T was at the very bottom of the list for the second year in a row. While AT&T's satisfaction score in 2011 wasn't as bad as its score from 2010, the Dallas-based cell phone provider, which recently discontinued its bid to acquire its better rival T-Mobile, still ranked at the bottom of the pack. Last year, AT&T was the only carrier for the Apple iPhone, but still managed to receive the lowest scores."
Just get an AT&T e-mail address (ala MyName@att.net), "serviced by Yahoo", if you want to find out why AT&T services are so hated.
The article is pretty much useless. While we know AT&T ranks lowest - we don't know what that means in absolute percentages. (I.E. they could be have a score of 99.98% percent customer satisfaction, and still be 'lowest'.)
But, that won't stop the cavalcade of anecdotal AT&T hate, after all Slashdot has to produce it's daily Two Minutes Hate against somebody corporate.
And this is another reason I am happy to be Australian. We have very strong consumer protection laws that stop this kind of bullshit. Service providers are regularly audited, the TIO has the power to send cases to the regulator, and you still get the same service no matter if you're on the lowest plan or on the top plan.
By no means is our system perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the US.
Service quality is not so bad where I live. I can talk and surf at the same time. And there is no way, I repeat no way to have two iPhones under one plan for less than $100/month in the USA other than AT&T. Would I prefer to have Verizon? Sure, but not $50 extra per month sure.
The Modern day AT&T is a reformation of the bulk of the old AT&T, albeit with management lead by one of the more ethically challenged corners rather than from the original top.
Sorta like the T-1000 in Terminator II.
The courts smashed AT&T into a bunch of little pieces, which rolled around like big balls of mercury each doing their own thing. Once the antitrust restrictions timed out, the balls began to merge. When enough of them had merged the resulting blob reshaped itself into something resembling (but somewhat different from) the original structure.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Remember when they merged and renamed all the AT&T Wireless stores Cingular...Then turned around a few months later and ditched the Cingular name, switching all the stores (including the newly acquired Cingular stores) back to AT&T? How many hundreds of millions of dollars did they piss away tossing out all those signs and replacing them? It wasn't like they just changed the name on the bills. They redressed every single store across the nation.
Verizon is no better. When the Motorola Razor was a big deal, it had a bug which would keep the data connection open upon receiving a picture message. Countless customers had data usage charges tacked onto their monthly bill because of this. I did. I called Verizon several times, at 40 minutes plus per call. They customer service representative told me I must have been surfing the web. I told him I was at work (at an ISP), in front of a computer, and was not surfing the web during those hours. Each time coincided with when I received a picture message. They had hundreds of dollars tacked onto my bill. I told one rep to do a simple Google search for the bug in the Razor. He said they would credit my account. He didn't. He left bad notes in whatever call logging system they had. Finally, about 1 month later, I got someone with brains. This rep said they were aware of the problem and applied a credit immediately.
Long hold times. Poor customer services. Lies. Getting hung up on. I've had the same issues with Verizon, ATT, and the latest venture Simple Mobile.
I swore I'd never go back to Verizon, but they are the only one with any service near my house.
Customer service sucks with all cell phone carriers. I've tried them all and have stories for each.
So a customer asks to have their service disconnected and AT&T not only does that but also waives the early termination fee? Yeah, what a "shit" move. I hope no other companies out there respond to customer complaints by doing what the customer asks and then some. I'd much rather spend half an hour while they transfer me to someone else to try to talk me out of what I specifically asked for.