Love the Phone, Hate the Phone Store

(MoneyWatch)  Americans love their wireless gadgets but say the process of buying a phone and service plan is bad and getting worse, J.D. Power finds in its 2008 Wireless Retail Sales Satisfaction Study.

MediaPost's Marketing Daily reports that wireless retail customer satisfaction at carrier-owned stores has dropped every year since 2005. In May 2008, the industry scored 699 on a 1,000-point scale, down 10 points since last October and 17 points in a year.

What's happened since 2005? Phone store employees haven't kept pace with the complexity of their products, which now double as PDAs, email devices, web browsers, cameras, music players, and personal style statements, says Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power. Customers don't like rebate gimmicks either.

Shoppers' biggest complaint, Parsons told Marketing Daily, is that sales reps "did not have enough knowledge about the products being offered, and that they did not explain the service-plan differences in enough detail." Mobile retailers should put more phones on display for customers to handle, shoppers said, and let them play before pushing them to sign a contract.

Who scores well? J.D. Power says T-Mobile's retail stores topped the list, scoring 716, followed by Alltel (714), Verizon (706), AT&T (693), and Sprint Nextel (654). "Well" is a relative thing, of course, since the highest grade was a solid C minus. Looks like there's a financial consequence to lousy customer service: Sprint, which just reported a $505 million loss and more than a million lost customers in the first quarter, avoided an F from J.D. Power by just 0.4 percent.