Tag Archives: ASCI Survey

No Love for the Big ISPs

It’s the time of the year when the results come out for the American Customer Satisfaction Index that asks customers to rate their satisfaction with a wide range of industries and the larger companies within those industries. This is a huge nationwide poll that ranks the public’s satisfaction with 400 large companies in 45 sectors.

As has been happening for many years, the large Internet Service Providers come in dead last when comparing ISPs to 44 other industries. ISPs were given an overall customer service ranking of 64. The industries ranked just above ISPs at the bottom were related, with subscription TV services (66) and video-on-demand services (68). This puts ISPs below gas stations (68), hospitals (69), and the U.S. Post Office (70).

Following are the specific rankings for the ISPs included in the survey:

2021 2022
Verizon FiOS 71 72
T-Mobile N/A 71
AT&T Internet 71 69
Xfinity (Comcast) 67 66
Spectrum (Charter) 63 63
Windstream 61 62
Cox 63 61
Frontier 57 61
CenturyLink 62 60
MediaCom 60 60
Optimum (Altice) 60 59
Suddenlink (Altice) 55 53

I’ve been following the ASCI results for many years, and it’s normal to see the ranking score vary by a small amount from year to year. But it looks like a significant change to see Frontier’s leap from a 57 ranking to 61. Perhaps the message that Frontier has changed coming out of bankruptcy is reaching customers. The most interesting number is the ranking for T-Mobile, which has been added to this survey for the first time. The company came in second, just below Verizon FiOS. Verizon has been at the top of the survey ranking for many years.

At the bottom are the two Altice companies, with Suddenlink ranked at the bottom again with a ranking of 53. Interestingly, Altice announced recently that it is relabeling Suddenlink as Optimum – which is second worse in ranking. From there, other ISPs are ranked slightly higher than Altice, such as MediaCom, CenturyLink, and Cox.

Companies can change rankings within the industry, but it’s hard. A decade ago, Comcast was nearer the bottom of the rankings and has slowly climbed closer to the top. I’m not a Comcast customer (I once was), and I don’t know what they’ve done to change, but I’ve noticed that I no longer read what used to be almost monthly news articles talking of specific ways the company mistreated customers.

What I find most amazing about this ranking is how politicians have fought so hard and often to protect these companies from regulation. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always thought that a state politician running to strongly regulate the biggest cable company in a state would gain a lot of votes.

How’s Your Competition Doing?

comcast-truck-cmcsa-cmcsk_largeA large percentage of my broadband clients compete against some of the biggest ISPs in the nation – either the big telcos, the big cable companies, or both. And so it’s worth taking a look from time to time to see how those big companies rate in terms of comparative customer service. The 2016 ASCI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) was recently released and reveals some of the following things about the biggest players in the telecom space:

The ASCI survey each year talks to 70,000 customers about more than 300 large businesses in 43 industries and 10 economic sectors. The survey gives each company a grade on a scale of 100.

As a sector both ISPs (overall rating 64) and Cable TV companies (overall rating 65) are still the two lowest rated sectors within the overall survey. To put those ratings into perspective there are a number of industry segments at or above a rating of 80 such as full-service restaurants, credit unions, household appliance makers and shipping companies.

ISPs as a whole are up slightly from an overall rating last year of 63 to a rating now of 64. There was a lot of change in positions of the big companies. Verizon FiOS is the highest rated company and went from a 68 rating in 2015 to a rating of 73 this year. At the bottom of the scale is Frontier Communications that fell from 61 last year down to a 56 rating for 2016. The other big gainers were Time Warner Cable (58 to 66), Bright House Networks, (63 to 67) and Charter Communications (57 to 63). The other big loser for the year is AT&T U-verse which dropped from the highest rated in 2015 of 69 to 64 this year.

Cable companies overall improved slightly last year from 63 to 65. But most companies stayed about the same except for moves upward by Comcast (54 to 62), Time Warner Cable (51 to 59) and Suddenlink (57 to 62). Verizon FiOS continues to top the list with a 70 rating with AT&T U-verse just behind at a 69. It will be interesting to see how the Charter / Time Warner Cable / Bright House merger will change these ratings for next year. I’ve read several industry analysts that predict that customer service at those companies will suffer during the transition. As might be imagined, cable customers are pretty happy overall with things like picture quality but the survey showed that they are very unhappy with the call center experience.

Perhaps the most surprising change this year among big companies was the noted improvement of satisfaction for Comcast. Last year they were dead last among cable providers and 2015 saw a rash of negative news articles about customer service fiascos. Comcast says every year that they are taking steps to improve customer service, but perhaps they are finally starting to make some changes that are noticeable to customers.

In the telephone world Vonage leaped to the top of the list moving from 73 to 78. What I find interesting is that everybody else rated between 64 and 72 – not a lot better than the cable companies. I wonder if that rating reflects general dissatisfaction with the telephone product or with these large companies in general.

One thing this survey does every year is to remind us how poorly the general public views the big telcos and cable companies. The industries consistently rate at the bottom for all major industries – far below banks, insurance companies and hospitals.

But these ratings also remind us that it’s possible for these larger companies to get their act together to provide better customer service. I know one of the most dreaded events in our household is having to make a call to Comcast. But the last few times my wife called she said it ‘wasn’t so bad’, and perhaps that explains their improved satisfaction score.

There are certainly new tools and technologies coming to customer service that ought to make customers happier. Companies that provide alternate ways for customers to communicate without having to talk to people are finding that this makes a significant segment of their customers happier. And it looks like we are on the verge of getting some fairly intelligent AI agents to handle routine customer inquiries, and that, sadly, will end the very entertaining news articles about the outrageous things said by Comcast service reps. But it might improve the customer service experience.