J.D. Power and Associates released their annual customer care rankings this month and the dubbed winners were Verizon Wireless (for contract service) and Virgin Mobile (for non-contract providers).
Even more interesting is that it would appear that according to J.D. Power, no other contract service provider was even in the running for the award (which Verizon received a five star rating to earn). While a two star rating was nothing new for AT&T and Sprint, T-Mobile had received the highest rating in the 2011 study (earning a five star rating) but fell down to a two star rating this year.
But with the sheer volume of prepaid wireless providers on the market, one has to wonder how J.D. Power qualifies which companies to include in the mix.
While many prepaid providers are actually subsidiaries of others, when it comes to customer care, each company handles things differently.
As an example, J.D. Power chose to include both Tracfone and Net10 (a subsidiary of Tracfone) in their customer satisfaction survey (both received different ratings) but failed to include Straight Talk, another very popular Tracfone subsidiary.
Our sister site, Prepaid Reviews has more reviews for Straight Talk than it does for Tracfone and Net10 combined, which makes us question why they (and many other popular prepaid providers) were left out of the survey.
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I have to wonder how many consumers they approach and on what they base their “customer satisfaction” I’ve been a prepaid fan for some time now, and as far as I’m concerned, connectivity is the number 1 decider. You can have the coolest phone, or great customer service, but if you are constantly dropping calls, it’s not very beneficial. In my opinion, Tracfone wins hands down in the coverage dept. compared to Virgin(or any of the other prepaid providers). Price comes in 2nd place in terms of choice, where StraightTalk has consistently offered low prices for a volume based offering. Yes, agreed, why are they not listed?