The MSNBC phone service comparison article makes for interesting reading. It’s interesting that they rated Verizon Wireless as the best of the bunch (under the “better” category). Due to my experiences with Verizon, they are one of the few companies that are on my permanent shit list, and that I will never recommend that anyone do business with. Truly scum. On the other hand, my SprintPCS experience has been fairly innocuous. My billing has never been screwed up, although wait times are slightly long (and getting worse), when I’ve contacted the customer service, the front-line reps have all at least been courteous and are often helpful and knowledgable, and reception in the LA area is nothing less than phenomenal (it’s also almost always been acceptable when I’ve been travelling). Of course, their site is down a little more often than I would have liked, and Claire really is horrible, but comparatively speaking, Sprint’s online service was lightyears beyond Verizon’s. A year and a half ago, when I dumped Verizon forever, they didn’t even offer invoicing and usage details on their site. Can you imagine that?
Having only been with T-Mobile for less a week now, it’s perhaps a bit early to pass final judgement, but right now, I am very satisfied with the customer service. The website is sorta not quite there (the Sidekick component is run by Danger anyway, so it’s not a super huge deal) although I am rather disappointed by how they report minute usage (as a lump sum, not separating out service calls or peak/offpeak times – you can, however find out by talking to a service rep – what a waste of everyone’s time). I’ll talk about the customer service when I do a full writeup of my hiptop (it’s gonna be looong), but I have to say, response time is great (average of about 2-3 minutes to the front-line, no matter what time of day), the reps are helpful and are quick to forward you to the proper 2nd-tier groups when necessary (for the times I’ve called, there has been no hesitation in sending me to the wireless data group), when I was escalated to L3 tech support, I had a great chat w/ the WDS engineer (who escalated my problem to Danger and called me back to follow up, as promised). I’m fearful of what’ll happen to this service if (when) they merge with Cingular.
Speaking of which, while the network seems a bit weaker (part of it is because out in California they are using Cingular’s network, part of it is probably also due to the Sidekick’s reception – it’s hard to follow up on the Motorola Timeport’s reception though, that thing was a tank. And the debug modes rocked) Overall, it’s not too bad. I get decent coverage at home and I actually get reception in ‘the cave’ at work where even my trusty Timeport fails me.