J.D. Power: Cable phone service beats telcos again

Customer satisfaction with residential telephone service is on the upswing for the second consecutive year, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 U.S. Residential Telephone Customer Satisfaction Study, but that trend will be of little satisfaction to telcos, which again find themselves lagging the customer satisfaction ratings of cable TV operators that offer telephony services.

Overall satisfaction with phone service scored 657 on a 1000-point scale, a figure that represented an increase of only four points since last year but about 22 points since 2008. That’s the largest two-year gain in the 15-year history of the study.

More troubling to telcos specifically is that in all four regions of the country — East, South, North Central and West — the highest satisfaction numbers were achieved by cable operators.

In the East, Cablevision ranked first scored 689, and Cox Communications came in second with 677. The top-ranked telco in the region was Windstream, in third place with 671. In the South, cable TV company Bright House Networks achieved a score of 724 to win the top ranking and was followed by Cox with 701 and Verizon with 673. In the North Central region, MSO WideOpenWest turned in the highest satisfaction score of the study with 742. Cincinnati Bell scored 696 to come in second — it was the only region in which a telco ranked as high as second—and TDS Telecom ranked third with 694. In the West, Cox surpassed bridesmaid status with a region-leading 693, while Time Warner Cable followed with 661 and Qwest finished third with 653.

Telcos have been beaten by cable guys before in J.D Power phone service surveys, though they have given back as good as they are getting by finishing ahead of cable operators in TV customer satisfaction surveys. Also, with about 30% of U.S. household having cut landlines, residential phone service may no longer be a must-win category for the telcos. Still, telcos such as Verizon have tried to inject new life into landline services by keeping them part of broadband bundles.

The J.D Power survey sizes up local and long-distance phone service satisfaction on the basis of five categories: performance and reliability, cost of service, billing, offerings and promotions, and customer service. Surveyors said that much of the increase in the last two years came from improving customer service numbers, which are believed to reflect improvements by carriers such as more streamlined interactive voice response systems and the overall quality of customer care interactions.