In 2026, can you get good customer service from the big carriers?

For decades, I grew up in a Verizon family. As I grew into an adult, I experimented with other carriers on postpaid and prepaid, but ultimately returned to Verizon more than half a decade ago. In that time, I have rarely had to deal with customer service because I have above average troubleshooting skills.

However, recently, my wife had the opportunity to test Verizon’s customer service. His phone was suddenly losing its cellular connection on a regular basis. Although she eventually resolved the issue, she had to deal with multiple chatbots, long call times, and other issues before she could actually get to a higher-level representative who had the skills necessary to help her resolve the issue.

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 deteriorated significantly across the board over the past decade or two. Several factors are responsible for this change, including rising network costs and inflation.

I remember using Verizon’s customer service from time to time when I was in my 20s under my family plan (about two decades ago). While Verizon was always more expensive and a little more pushy in terms of selling customers, it wasn’t that hard to find someone who could solve your issues without all the hassles required in 2026.

Over the past few years, the company has significantly cut the number of customer service representatives, largely done away with in-house customer service, and increasingly adopted tools like AI chatbots, as well as its AI Shopper system, which will essentially add items to your cart that it thinks you might like by default.

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

While T-Mobile is still considered the best when it comes to customer service, even the un-carrier has placed less emphasis on customer service in the last year or so. T-Mobile has reduced the number of in-store and online representatives in favor of greater reliance on do-it-yourself service through AI bots, tools and the T-Life app. Similarly, it’s become harder to do anything in the Store without using an app and setting it up. Although the carrier has denied this, there has been some speculation that it may also be testing limited AI use in its T-Force Response system.

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

There were many factors due to which customer service was not given priority.

First, the fact that LTE and 5G are incredibly expensive that require ongoing investment and maintenance has helped drive up the cost of maintaining mobile networks. To help paint a picture of how expensive all this is, a S&P Global’s 2022 report Indicated that large US wireless carriers spent a combined $100 billion on 5G spectrum.

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

As network costs increased and the economy worsened, networks looked for areas where they could cut back, and customer service was a natural release valve here. These are just two obvious factors, but there are many more, such as the death of smaller competing brands. When I was young, Cricket Wireless, Altel, Sprint, and US Cellular were some of the existing smaller networks that offered postpaid alternatives to the big three networks. All of these companies have since been swallowed by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. As competition decreases, the chances of outdoing each other in terms of service quality diminish.

I also suspect that the maturing smartphone market has played a role here as well. In the early days, smartphones were more complex. The software wasn’t as mature, and people weren’t as familiar with it. Direct customer service helped many people move into the new mobile age, but over time, it became less necessary.

All of these factors are creating increasingly unrealistic demands on customer service and sales representatives. As targets become harder to reach, employees turn to more aggressive sales tactics, getting as much as possible from each customer contact. I can’t say I entirely blame the employees, as they are just trying to make a living, but the result has been an environment where you only want customer service if you have no possible way to deal with the problem.

The honest answer is that customer service as we once knew it is unlikely to return unless there is a major customer protest that leaves carriers feeling they have no other choice. It seems more likely that carriers will continue the digital-first shopping experience they’ve been emphasizing. This means fewer retail operations, fewer human representatives, and more automation to save money and speed up customer interactions.

Like most technological innovations, the road will be bumpy. We are already seeing this with existing AI tools. For example, there are several posts on Reddit about people experiencing AT&T problems AI chatbots deliver contact numbers that are linked to fraudsters. This is likely due to the scraped data used to train the bot, although it could also be due to network hacks and other security issues.

The good news is that technology often goes through such difficult times before future improvements overcome the obstacles. Hopefully, this is the same path that LLM-based AI bots take. If AI ever stabilizes, the end result will be a customer experience that is fast, friendly, and thorough. But it will probably never again have the same human element that it had before. Whether this is a good or bad thing will probably depend on who you ask.