T-Mobile Again Dominates AT&T, Verizon, Sprint in Business Wireless Survey

It’s a clean sweep for T-Mobile. Again.

J.D. Power just announced its 2019 Business Wireless Satisfaction Study, and the Deutsche Telekom-owned mobile network operator earned the top rating in all three business segments for the third consecutive year.

T-Mobile’s John Legere

The carrier in a celebratory press release credited “generous hotspot data, published rate plan pricing” and strong customer service among the many factors attributing to its dominance. T-Mobile John Legere said his company takes a customer-first approach.

“Four years ago, we took a leap of faith and made a bet that business customers want simplicity, transparency and a fair value. Three straight J.D. Power wins later, and it’s clear that we were right! Business customers continue to shake up the status quo with us, and they are happy about it!” Legere said in a statement.

AT&T, Sprint and Verizon placed second in the large enterprise, SMB and very small business categories, respectively.

The study surveyed nearly 2,800 U.S. business professionals that are responsible for their companies’ wireless services. They answered questions about reliability, promotions, cost, billing, support staff and customer service.

J.D. Power noted three specific trends in its news announcement. First, very small businesses aren’t enjoying the rapid growth in satisfaction that their larger counterparts are seeing. While enterprise respondents are much happier with their carriers’ customer service than they were three years ago (a score of 868 vs. 821), very small business customers report only a slight customer service improvement (770 vs. 761).

The smallest segment experienced less dedicated support, more transfers and longer hold time than SMBs and enterprises.

“The growing gap in customer service satisfaction between large enterprise customers and very small business customers is a missed opportunity for wireless carriers,” said Ian Greenblatt, J.D. Power’s technology, media and telecom practice lead. “The small business customer segment presents unique challenges because these companies are more reliant on their wireless carriers to solve tech issues and are disproportionally affected when problems arise; in fact, negative customer service contacts take a far greater toll on the satisfaction of very small business customers than on large enterprise customers. Carriers that get the small business formula right will see significant improvements in retention and advocacy.”

Verizon dominated the J.D. Power Business Wireline Satisfaction Study earlier this year, outperforming its rivals in the SMB and very small business categories. AT&T scored first with large enterprises.

Scroll through the images below to see the precise scores for T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.