Customer service wait times getting worse

Last week, J.D. Power and Associates released a semi-annual survey on the state of customer service in the wireless industry. While Verizon took home top honors, that’s not the main point of this. What caught my attention, and what surely was of note to those who leave comments on our reviews, is that wait time for customer service is up to 4.4 minutes on average. Yikes. That’s up 34 percent from last year, when the average was 3.3 minutes on hold. This cannot be good for the wireless industry’s spotty, to be kind, reputation regarding how they treat their customers.

What makes this figure more troubling is that about half of U.S. wireless subscribers had to contact customer service over the past year. That’s about 125 million customers, 75 percent of whom used the phone to call customer service — and wait their average of 4.4 minutes to talk to someone.

To me, if there truly was a high level of competition in the wireless space, companies would be getting better at customer service, as to attract a larger subscriber base. Instead, they’re regressing. What can we make of this? It’s tough to say. Many of the major carriers received scored fairly well. On the 110-point scale, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Alltel all ranked over 100, while AT&T sat at 97. Sprint, of course, brought down the bar, ranking at 79, where the lowest score could be 70.

Does this mean prepaid carriers are bringing the number down? Judging by our user comments, and search strings like this, yeah, that could be the case.

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