I’m tired of Verizon’s customer service, but is the grass any greener on the other side?

For decades, I grew up in a Verizon household. As I became an adult, I experimented with other carriers on the postpaid and prepaid side, but ultimately returned to Verizon a little over half a decade ago. In that time, I’ve rarely ever needed to deal with customer service as I tend to have above-average troubleshooting skills.

Recently, though, my wife did have the opportunity to put Verizon’s customer service to the test. Her phone had been regularly dropping its cellular connection out of the blue. While she eventually resolved the problem, she had to deal with several chatbots, long call times, and other issues before she actually got to a high-level rep who had the skills necessary to help address the problem.

While Verizon’s reputation for customer service has declined over the years, the bigger question is whether or not they are any worse than the rest of the big carriers. For the most part, the answer is no. The truth is that cellular customer service has eroded pretty much across the board over the last decade or two. Many factors have led to this change, including soaring network costs and inflation. 

Customer service has largely degraded across the industry as a whole

I remember using Verizon’s customer service from time to time when I was in my early 20s under our family’s plan (roughly two decades ago). While Verizon was always more expensive and a bit pushier with upselling customers, it was never all that hard to find someone who could resolve your issues without all the hoops required in 2026.

In the last few years, the company has significantly cut the number of customer service reps, largely pushed away from in-house customer service, and has increasingly adopted AI chatbots, as well as tools like its AI shopper system, which will essentially add items into your cart that it thinks you might like by default.

While it’s easy enough to remove these items at checkout, this highlights a problem we’re seeing from all three major carriers: the idea that every customer interaction is primarily about upselling, not satisfying the customer’s actual wants and needs. As mentioned, Verizon isn’t alone in all of this.

While T-Mobile is still largely considered the best when it comes to customer service, even the Un-carrier has put less emphasis on customer service over the last year or so. T-Mobile has scaled back the number of in-store and online reps in favor of AI bots, tools, and a heavier reliance on do-it-yourself service via the T-Life app. Likewise, it’s become harder to do anything in-store without using an app to set it all up. While the Un-Carrier denies it, there has even been some speculation that it might be testing limited AI use in its T-Force response system as well.

AT&T hasn’t pushed AI on the front-end nearly as much as its competitors, but it has still reduced customer service resources across the board. All three major carriers have also dramatically reduced their retail footprint over the last decade or so, and there’s a continual push toward online purchases and same-day delivery over reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar customer service.

There are many reasons behind the decline, but will it ever reverse?

There were many factors that led to the deprioritization of customer service.

First, there’s the fact that LTE and 5G have been incredibly expensive additions that require constant investment and maintenance, which has helped drive up the cost of maintaining a mobile network. To help paint a picture of just how expensive all this is, a 2022 report from S&P Global indicated the big US wireless carriers spent a combined $100 billion on 5G spectrum.

Inflation, the pandemic, and other economic issues have also led to increased pressure from investors to squeeze as much profit as possible while costs continue to rise in the background.

As network costs increased and the economy worsened, the networks looked for areas they could cut, and customer service was a natural release valve here. Those are just two obvious factors, but there are plenty more, such as the death of smaller competitor brands. When I was younger, Cricket Wireless, Altell, Sprint, and US Cellular were just a few of the existing smaller networks that offered postpaid alternatives to the big three. All of these companies have since been swallowed up by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. As competition decreases, there’s less to one-up each other in terms of service quality.

I also suspect the maturing smartphone market has played a role here, too. In the early days, smartphones were more complicated. The software wasn’t as mature, and people weren’t as familiar with it. Direct customer service helped many folks transition to the new mobile era, but over time, this became less necessary.

All of these factors have also led to increasingly unrealistic demands from customer service and sales reps. As targets become harder and harder to reach, employees turn toward more aggressive sales tactics to leech as much as they can from every customer interaction. I can’t say I fully blame the employees, as they are just trying to make a living, but the result has become an environment where you only seek customer service if you have no possible way of handling the problem yourself.

Will customer service ever become a bigger priority again?

The honest answer is that customer service as we once knew it is unlikely to return unless there’s a major customer backlash that makes the carriers feel they have no other choice. It seems more likely that carriers will continue down the digital-first shopping experience they’ve been pushing toward. That means fewer retail operations, fewer human reps, and more automation to save money and speed up customer interaction.

Like most tech innovations, the road will be bumpy. We’re already seeing this with existing AI tools. For example, there are several posts on Reddit of people running into problems where AT&T’s own AI chatbots end up giving out contact numbers that are connected with fraudsters. This is likely down to the scrapped data used to train the bot, though it could also be caused by network hacks and other security issues.

The good news is that technology often goes through rough periods like this before future refinements smooth out the bumps. Hopefully, this is the same path LLM-based AI bots take. If AI does ever stabilize, the end result would be a customer experience that’s fast, friendly, and thorough. But it will likely never again have that same human element it once did. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing will likely depend on who you ask.