Hold Times Drag Out At Wireless Companies

Nobody likes waiting on hold. If it's not the jazzy elevator music that drives you up the wall, it's the repeated "your call is important to us" message that serves not to calm you, but instead to remind you that it's been a really long time and you're still on hold.

Wireless companies seem not to have gotten the memo. According to a J.D. Power and Associates study released Thursday, the average time customers waited to speak to a representative at their wireless phone company in early 2008 was 4.4 minutes, up 34 percent from the none-too-brief 3.3 minutes we waited in 2003.

The study tracked wireless carrier customer care in three areas: calls to customer service, visits to a store and questions via the Internet.

Nearly half of all wireless customers contacted customer service within the past year, according to the study, and 75 percent of these customers did so by phone. (Maybe the other 25 percent couldn't call because their phones were broken?)

Risk Of The Switch

Some providers did better than others. On the chart, which for some reason goes from 70 to 110 (a J.D. Power spokeswoman said that the scale in fact has no limit), Verizon Wireless received a score of 103, Alltel Wireless scored 102, T-Mobile scored 100 and AT&T got a score of 97. Sprint Nextel Corp.'s score was much lower, at 79, making it the only provider that didn't get a rating of at least "about average." It got two gold dots, which put it in a category simply labeled "the rest."

Sprint should take heed: Kirk Parsons, J.D. Power's senior director of wireless services, said customers who are put on hold are 83 percent more likely to switch wireless carriers than those who aren't.

"With an increase in hold times, providers run the risk of decreasing customer satisfaction and losing customers to other providers," he said. Sprint lost almost 1 million customers in the second quarter, as AT&T and Verizon gained subscribers.

Checking In On Customers

"We've had issues with customer care," Sprint spokeswoman Kathleen Dunleavy said. "Improving the customer experience has been and continues to be our No. 1 priority right now."

The company is implementing a number of procedures, including checking in with customers in the second, fifth, and 12th month after they have signed up for service to see if they have questions.

Sprint also monitors customers' wireless usage and recommends new plans if they are going over their minutes frequently.

And on a positive note, Dunleavy said, Sprint's hold times are "stabilizing." Translation: They're not as bad as they used to be.