AT&T overtakes T-Mobile and Verizon in customer satisfaction, says study

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has released its latest study on wireless providers and smartphones. In an interesting outcome, AT&T has beaten out both T-Mobile and Verizon for customer satisfaction even though it usually ranks third when it comes to performance and more. However, all three major US carriers ranked very close.

ACSI published the new report today based on almost 15,881 respondents that it interviewed between April 2022 and March 2023.

Looking at the major US carriers, AT&T jumped 3% this year to a score of 75 out of 100 for customer satisfaction.

That put AT&T one point ahead of T-Mobile at 74 and two points ahead of Verizon at 73. U.S. Cellular came in fourth with a score of 70.

The results are interesting as T-Mobile has been winning top awards for performance, 5G availability, and more in studies like Opensignal and Ookla for a few years.

Meanwhile, Verizon has been expanding its 5G network quickly over the last couple of years and usually ranks close to T-Mobile. Interestingly, the ASCI study showed no change in satisfaction for both T-Mobile and Verizon from the previous year’s study.

For context, while ~16,000 respondents is a decent amount of consumers for a survey, Opensignal and Ookla are usually looking at a sample size in the millions.

As shown above, the overall wireless satisfaction ranking increased by 1% to 74.

Here’s how the major carriers compared for call quality/consistency and coverage/speed:

ASCI didn’t break down the following categories by carrier, but these were how consumers rated various wireless provider features from 2022 to 2023:

When it came to MNVO’s (smaller carriers that use the major carrier networks), here’s how satisfaction shook out:

For a look at how satisfied consumers were with iPhone, Samsung, Google, and other smartphones, check out our full coverage of the ASCI results here.

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