After years of touting their networks, mobile phone companies are trying a new tack to keep customers: being nice.
The nation's four biggest wireless providers are polishing their manners after getting consistently poor marks in customer satisfaction surveys. A Consumer Reports magazine survey, released Monday, ranked the satisfaction level below that of health maintenance organizations and cable TV companies.
Rather than rely solely on efforts to widen coverage, improve reception and curtail dropped calls, cellphone companies are explaining the fine print in contracts, offering more generous return policies or adjusting their calling plans to reduce exorbitant overage charges.
Building a better reputation is all the more important as fiercely competitive companies face a saturated market that forces them to chase one another's customers.
"All the carriers will have cool cellphones and technology," said Michael Bennett, director of customer affairs at Cingular Wireless. "It's the consumer-friendly services that can be the differentiator. Competition will occur in this area."
Whether the efforts are paying off is unclear. Some private surveys suggest they aren't, but statistics compiled by the Federal Communications Commission indicate that they may be.
The number of complaints to the federal agency dropped 16% in the first nine months this year from the same period last year. And the number of gripes about billing and rates -- by far the biggest single category -- fell 13%.
Tell that to Greg Randall of Woodland Hills, who gave Verizon Wireless "an A" on technical quality but flunked it on customer service.
A run-in with the company over a billing issue this year took more than a month and nearly a dozen phone calls to resolve, he said.
"They were very pleasant but very unresponsive," Randall said. "They give you a lot of talk and not much of anything else. When you get off the phone, you wonder if you just got screwed."
Rhod Zimmerman of West Hills was one of numerous former AT&T Wireless customers upset with how Cingular has handled them since its acquisition of AT&T Wireless last year.
"Their attempts at appeasing me were measly," he said. "They did only what they had to do."
A recent study by marketing information firm J.D. Power & Associates found that overall satisfaction with wireless service providers dropped 10% during 2004, the biggest year-over-year change since it began studying such performance in 1995.
Unlike the FCC statistics, J.D. Power's report surveys consumer attitudes nationwide, said company analyst Kirk Parsons. "Normally, the FCC only gets people who are really mad, so the complaints are not like a general consumer study and are not representative of the country as a whole," he said.
The nation's top carriers -- which serve 86% of the cellphone subscribers -- insist that they are gaining ground, even as the number of wireless users overtook the number of land-line customers this year.
Sprint Nextel Corp., for instance, bases part of employee salaries, from those of front-line workers to those of senior managers, on how well they treat customers.
"People tell us they want to talk to someone pleasant and to get the problem fixed on the first call. And they don't want to wait a long time on the [telephone] line or in the store," said Cindy Rock, Sprint's senior vice president for customer service. "We're very focused on all three areas."
Analysts are skeptical. Their surveys, which show some upbeat signs, nevertheless find that people are still upset and that satisfaction levels continue to erode.
The FCC numbers really don't indicate much, said Mark Kotkin, Consumer Reports' associate survey research director. "In our opinion, service hasn't changed much in four years in terms of quality and customer service," he said.
Of 50,000 magazine subscribers polled in 18 metropolitan markets, 47% said they were completely or very satisfied overall, "which is not a particularly good score related to other services," Kotkin said.
Parsons said the industry had created unrealistic expectations by over-hyping its products and services. "In general," he said, "the carriers have not kept up with consumer expectations, and those expectations are rising."
Analyst Charles Golvin at Forrester Research Inc. said his firm's recent survey showed that customer satisfaction with cellphones continued to drop, though at a slower pace. But the results also showed that the level of dissatisfaction fell dramatically.
"It says to me that people are more and more resigned to the service they get," Golvin said. "The overall trend is a move toward apathy."
Carriers are poaching more from competitors than they are mining new customers. Even that's getting harder, though. Industrywide, just 1.9% of cellphone users jumped from one carrier to another in the second quarter.
The industry's leaders are trying to set themselves apart.
