J.D. Powers drops T-Mobile to fourth place for Customer Service

In the latest J.D. Powers Wireless Customer Care report, T-Mobile, once among the perennial leaders in customer service, dropped to fourth place in the survey covering July-December 2011. Considering that T-Mobile has finished first in the Customer Care survey 11 out of 16 times, blame could be put on the drop in morale that accompanied the long wait for the closing of the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, a closing that never happened. In the previous survey from July 2011, T-Mobile had finished second. Now, the nation's fourth largest carrier finished fourth in customer service after dropping 27 points to trail third place AT&T by 4 points. Verizon Wireless topped the customer service survey in the latest report as well as winning the prior survey, announced last July.

While AT&T did not decide to pull out of its agreement to buy T-Mobile until late December, by then the carrier had started to improve its customer service according to the survey. After a poor showing in October, T-Mobile made some improvements and added 65 points to its score in December, a month that saw the carrier finish second in customer service. While it was not enough to get T-Mobile out of fourth place for the entire period of the survey, the carrier did make some new changes to its customer plans, policies and procedures. The goal is to improve the performance of T-Mobile's front-line employees, the ones that deal with the public every day. T-Mobile is trying to get customer's problems solved during the first call.

Besides getting rated on how the carrier handles phone calls, a big part of the survey, 27%, is based on customer's response to the way they are treated when walking in to a T-Mobile store. The latest survey shows that the mobile operator lost some points for not being as prompt in serving walk-ins, and for not offering a timely solution to customer problems. The complete results of J.D. Powers' Wireless Retail Sales Satisfaction Study will be released on February 18th. In the meantime, T-Mobile sent out an email to its employees, asking them to start "Winning Back Our Customer’s Trust One Call at a Time!"

source: TmoNews