If you hate your Internet or pay TV service, you re definitely not alone.
Yet again, providers of such services drew the lowest average ratings among all the industries evaluated in the American Customer Satisfaction Index s annual rankings, which the organization released on Tuesday. What s worse is that, as a whole, telecommunications companies aren t getting any better at providing customer service; in fact, according to the ACSI, the average service provided by pay TV companies actually deteriorated last year.
As if to underscore the lousy ratings, Comcast, the nation s largest high-speed broadband provider, reportedly experienced a widespread outage on Monday that affected customers in the Bay Area and Seattle. Reports indicated that many customers were experiencing problems with the Internet service throughout the day. Personally, my service was out for about 30 minutes to an hour in the early evening.
The latest ACSI ratings were pretty damning for the telecommunications providers, particularly Comcast. On the whole, both pay TV service and Internet service drew 63 ratings in the report. For Internet service, that was unchanged from last year. For the pay TV providers, their rating declined from an average of 65 a year ago.
The top-rated pay TV provider in the ACSI report was Verizon, which drew a score of 71, while the top Internet provider was AT&T, which scored a 69.
To put those scores in context, the U.S. Postal Service gets a 69 rating, and the lowest average rating of any other non-telecommunications industry is health insurance, which earned a 70.
In other words, even the highest-rated pay TV and Internet service companies aren t particular well liked.
And the lowest-rated companies, which included Comcast, Mediacom, Time Warner Cable and Charter, appear to be loathed by their customers, according to the report.
Time Warner Cable, which recently abandoned a merger deal with Comcast and now is pursuing a merger with Charter and Bright House Networks, had the lowest rated pay TV service, drawing a pathetic 51 rating in the report. That was down 5 points from its already dramatically low rating last year.
Mediacom, which offers service primarily in the Midwest and Southeast and in a few rural areas of California, was tied with Time Warner Cable with a 51 rating, while Comcast came in at a not-much-better 54, down 6 points from a year ago.
On the Internet service front, Comcast was the big loser, posting a 56 rating, down 1 point from last year. Mediacom was barely better, with a 57 rating, tied with Charter; while Time Warner Cable posted a 58, up 1 point from a year ago.
The silver lining for Bay Area residents — such as it is — was that AT&T s services rated relatively high in both categories. Not only did it have the top-ranked Internet service, with a rating that was up 4 points from last year, but it had the second-ranked pay TV service, with a score of 69, unchanged from a year ago.
The report comes as Comcast in particular has vowed to improve its customer service, promising to hire thousands of new workers. Of course, that s a promise that the company has maderepeatedly; the report indicates that it has had little success in keeping it.
File photo by AP Photo/Elise Amendola.
