The nation’s fifth largest wireless carrier, U.S. Cellular, beat out its larger rivals to take top honors in Temkin’s annual customer experience ranking, the latter said Tuesday.
According to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, U.S. Cellular took first place with a score of 71 percent out of 100. The carrier beat out Verizon, which tied TracFone for second place with 67 percent, as well as AT&T and T-Mobile, which also tied in third with 66 percent. Cricket was in a close fourth with 65 percent, while Sprint trailed at the back of the pack behind even Virgin Mobile (63 percent) and Metro PCS (62 percent) with a score of 60 percent.
In its rating, Temkin said a score of 70 percent or above is considered “good” and a score of 80 percent or above is considered “excellent.” A score below 60 percent is considered “poor,” the company said.
“Congratulations to U.S. Cellular for earning the only good customer experience rating amongst a group of wireless carriers that deliver mediocre customer experience,” Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group, commented.
Out of the nine wireless carriers covered by the ratings, Temkin pointed out nearly all managed to maintain or boost their scores over last year (excluding U.S. Cellular and Cricket, which weren’t scored in 2016). Only Metro PCS dropped in the rankings, dipping from a score of 63 percent last year to 62 percent this year.
AT&T and T-Mobile tied for the biggest leap year over year, both rising from 56 percent last year to 66 percent this year. Verizon and Sprint also made significant gains, jumping from 59 percent to 67 percent and 54 percent to 60 percent, respectively.
Click to enlarge. Graph Credit: Wireless Week with data from Temkin Group
As an overall group, the wireless industry came in with an average customer experience rating of 65 percent – allowing the industry to tie for 16th place out of 20 industries including airlines, auto dealers, banks, computer and tablet makers, fast food chains, hotels and rooms, and insurance carriers, among others. Temkin pointed out wireless’ average rating has made progress over the last year, rising eight percentage points from 2016 to 2017.
Temkin said its ratings are based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers to evaluate their recent experiences with the companies across three dimensions: success (can you do what you want to do?), effort (how easy is it to work with the company?), and emotion (how do you feel about the interactions?). The company then averaged these three scores to produce each company’s Temkin Experience Rating.
