Big Internet service providers hit all time low in customer satisfaction ratings, according to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) telecommunications company rankings. The survey ranks telecoms companies and service offerings on a 100-point scale. ISPs dropped from an overall industry average of 64 out of 100 in 2017 to 62 this year, and overall the broadband industry is making people very unhappy.
According to ACSI, it’s a case of the bad just getting worse…
Internet service providers (ISPs) are down 3.1% to 62—an all-time low for the industry that along with subscription TV already had the poorest customer satisfaction among all industries tracked by the ACSI.
Customers are unhappy with the high price of poor service, but many households have limited alternatives as more than half of all Americans have only one choice for high speed broadband. Every major ISP deteriorates this year except for Comcast’s Xfinity, which is unchanged.
Verizon’s FiOS fiber to the home service is still top rated with a score of 70, and AT&T wasn’t far behind with 68. Charter Communications and Comcast are below the industry already dismal customer satisfaction average – both scored 60. Suddenlink wasn’t much better at 61, both it and Charter saw a year over year decrease of 5 points.
Frontier Communications and Cox Communications bring up the rear among major California ISPs, with customer satisfaction ratings of 54 and 59, respectively.
As a group, small ISPs did better than average, but still not great, getting a combined score of 63.
On specific aspects of service, call centers are the biggest pain point for consumers, getting a 59 out of 100 rating, while bricks and mortar store staff are well regarding, topping the benchmarks at 76. But all customer experience ratings are down from last year’s…
Internet service is less reliable (69), more prone to outages (68), and performance during peak hours is worse (68). Video streaming quality is unchanged (68), but overall data transfer speed is lagging compared with a year ago (–3% to 67), as is the quality of email, storage, and security (–3% to 69).
The rankings are based on an email survey conducted this past March and April. More than 45,000 customers responded.