Among the Big Four wireless carriers, T-Mobile is alone in having customers who a vague amount of loyalty. 23% of T-Mobile customers wouldn’t switch for anything, compared to 15% of Verizon customers.
Why are Verizon’s numbers so much worse? BI Intelligence’s Digital Telecom Consumer Survey, the same dataset that compared loyalty between different carriers, has a few relevant answers.
According to the survey, nearly 40% of Verizon customers said they’d switch carriers if it meant being able to stream data without it counting against their data cap. That’s a feature that T-Mobile used to offer via the Binge On program, but it’s actually been usurped in favor of unlimited data plans these days.
Streaming video is a testy subject for Verizon right now. Last month, it made significant changes to all of its plans, including adding a throttle on all video streams, capping smartphone video at 720p and tablet/hotspot video at 1080p. The survey was complete by July 2017, so it won’t have taken Verizon’s recent changes into account.
The other factor BI highlighted was being able to rollover unused data. Verizon only recently introduced (expensive) unlimited data plans, and the majority of its postpaid customers are still on metered plans, where they’d like to be able to roll over unused data. It’s the opposite case for T-Mobile’s customers, only 11% of whom wanted to rollover unused data. A big part of that difference is likely the number of T-Mobile customers on unlimited data plans, who wouldn’t really want to roll over data anyway.
Verizon is a much larger carrier than T-Mobile in terms of customers, with a wider variety of users on all sorts of different plans. It’s no surprise that its customers will have more complaints than T-Mobile or Sprint, which focus on value-for-money and simplicity rather than complicated rate plans customized for everyone. But Verizon might want to take some notes from the competition: T-Mobile’s paper loyalty numbers show up on the bottom line just as well as they do in a survey.
