Mobile Customer Satisfaction On The Wane

Consumers' overall satisfaction with mobile carriers is down 10 percent from last year, a new study says, continuing a downward trend since the study's inception in 1995. The company behind it says it's been "difficult for carriers to meet customer expectations" over time, particularly as consolidation has sped up, pointing to the fact that carriers involved in big mergers -- Cingular, Sprint and Nextel -- saw worse figures than their rivals that didn't merge. While there probably isn't a lot of value in reading into the numbers for individual carriers, the overall decline and the 10-year downward trend is a pretty significant indictment of how out of whack carriers are with customers. But in a mature market with relatively equal service from all the different carriers, there's little incentive for any single one to improve. And with the insistence on things like long-term contracts with high termination fees that consumers clearly don't like and offering little reason for customers to remain loyal, these numbers aren't surprising.

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