J.D. Power: AT&T unseats Verizon as customer care leader

AT&T is the absolute bee's knees in customer care among the big four carriers. That's if you're listening to J.D. Power, anyway, which finds that longtime champion Verizon is no longer the best at solving its customers' problems. As a precaution, this study is rather narrow in scope and considers just three components of customer care: telephone assistance, online support and in-store personnel. Naturally, this is just one component of customer satisfaction, and factors such as coverage, data speed and call quality aren't considered -- look to Consumer Reports for insight on those. Still, customer care is important and J.D. Power suggests that it's now at its highest levels since 2009. Sadly, not everyone's a winner, as the study also finds that Sprint and T-Mobile both fall below the industry average.

On the prepaid side, MetroPCS is keeping its position as the front-runner, but even more curious, it's said that a whopping 69 percent of non-contract customers use carrier apps to manage their accounts. What's more, customer satisfaction is reportedly considerably higher among prepaid carriers that provide these management apps to their subscribers. In this context, it seems that well-targeted bundled apps aren't necessarily bloatware, but we still think its carriers should let you remove that stuff.

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J.D. Power: average smartphone satisfaction is up, fights are fierce for second place

JD Power average smartphone satisfaction is up, fights are fierce for second place

Satisfaction studies can sound like broken records, with familiar leaders and positions that don't move. Not so with J.D. Power's first smartphone survey for 2013. While Apple maintained the top spot for the ninth time in a row through US customers' happiness with the hardware design and ease of use, most of its major competitors made big strides in reliability, speed and camera quality in the past half-year -- to the point where there was a virtual dead heat for second place between HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung. They lifted the average by about 22 points and left only LG (which has few high-end US phones) and a pre-transition BlackBerry lagging behind. We wouldn't be surprised to see an improvement for those last two by the September study.

Whatever your platform preference, J.D. Power has found some shared experiences. Bugs are still a problem on phones when about 17 percent of those asked ran into some kind of glitch. However, it's clear that those who lean heavily on their smartphones tend to love them: survey takers who used social networking apps for 100-plus minutes a week were significantly more likely to recommend whatever they had. That might help explain a high conversion rate among basic phone owners, where three quarters of those planning to update their devices expected to move to a smartphone.

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Source: J.D. Power