Customer Service Showdown: Who Wins?

The good people at Laptop Magazine recently undertook the daunting task of testing and rating the customer service of the Big Four carriers in the United States.

So they set out on a trip across New York City, the phone lines, and the interwebs in an effort to gauge the parts of the carriers’ customer service departments that customers will interact with the most. In their surveying, Laptop Magazine visited two New York City stores for each carrier, called customer service once during the midday and once during the post-work ‘rush hour,’ and then got onto the carrier’s website to seek help. All the while they were attempting to solve problems with a BlackBerry from that carrier: setting up email, tethering, and internet radio.

So how did the carriers rank?  Laptop Magazine has fairly extensive notes on each customer service experience they had, but what we find most interesting are the final results. The grades for the individual evaluations varied between a C- (AT&T phone support) and multiple A-, the overall grades ended up closely paralleling that spread. T-Mobile took the customer service crown with a composite score of A-, while Sprint and Verizon had to settle for sharing the second place medal after both solid B's. Poor AT&T, however, was levied with a aggregate C+, dragged down by scores of B- and below.

Read the rest at Laptop Magazine