Sprint's mission to improve its customer satisfaction could be starting to pay off, suggests a new study published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
The ACSI, which is published quarterly by the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, finds that Sprint's customer satisfaction rating has surged upward by 12.5% over its customer satisfaction rating last year. In last year's study, the ACSI reported that Sprint had hit rock bottom in its customer satisfaction ratings as it fell to an all-time low score of 56 on a 100-point scale.
Sprint's improvement in customer satisfaction now puts it within striking distance of AT&T for third place on the ACSI's customer satisfaction survey. In the newest survey, AT&T saw its ratings drop by 5.6% from last year and the ACSI speculates that the drop may have been caused by the influx of new users who signed on with the carrier because of the iPhone.
"Many of the new customers are different from the regular AT&T customer in that they seem to have more data-intensive needs," the ACSI says. "The problem is not the iPhones themselves, but rather that the influx of new users seems to have strained AT&T Mobility's network."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/052009-sprint-customer-satisfaction.html