In the past months, several national and regional broadband service providers (BSPs) and mobile providers have introduced new plan features to help enhance their customer experience (CX) efforts. Most prominent among these CX initiatives are service guarantees and price locks.
Service Guarantees
Before price locks became the CX trend of 2025, two national providers introduced service guarantees.
Last September, Spectrum by Charter announced a series of “customer commitment” changes including lowering some prices, introducing service guarantees, and promising no annual contracts.
The service guarantee involved four points:
- Same-day technician visits (when requested before 5 p.m.) and bill credits for outages lasting more than two hours.
- No annual contracts on residential services, outage notifications to customers within 15 minutes, and whole-dollar pricing with taxes and fees included in the listed price.
- Money-back guarantees in the first 30 days after a customer starts a service, and 14 days for mobile devices.
- Fast broadband speeds and expanding to unserved and underserved communities.
“If we are charging for a service, it should work all the time; if it doesn’t, our customers should trust that we’ll make it right,” said Cliff Hagan, Executive Vice President, Customer Operations for Charter.
In January, AT&T followed suit, claiming to be the first and only carrier to offer a customer guarantee across both wireless and fiber networks for both consumers and small businesses. The AT&T Guarantee includes these pledges:
- Upon a network interruption of 20 minutes or longer to fiber customers or 60 minutes or longer to wireless customers, AT&T will either restore service or automatically provide a bill credit.
- A promise to provide the company’s best deals on any smartphone for new and existing customers.
- No hidden fees or equipment charges with AT&T Fiber.
- The ability to speak to a technical expert within five minutes or schedule a convenient callback, plus same- or next-day technician availability for fiber issues.
Earlier this month, Midco — a broadband service provider serving homes and businesses throughout the Midwest — introduced a 12-point customer commitment. The commitment involved promises around reliability, price transparency, customer service, and other categories.
The Midco customer commitment also promises no hidden fees, no data caps, no contracts, and shared cost for contract buy-outs.
Price Locks
Last month, a new CX trend emerged as a popular offering: price locks. Four large providers introduced price locks in April:
- Verizon started the trend early in the month, introducing a three-year price lock on all plans. The company’s existing myPlan customers were automatically enrolled. If customers made changes to myPlan by adding or deleting options, the company said the price lock would reset for another three years.
- Comcast’s Xfinity introduced a price lock less than two weeks later. The Xfinity price lock is for new Xfinity customers and offers a five-year price guarantee. Plus, customers can cancel at any time without a penalty.
- T-Mobile announced two new plans with a price guarantee for talk, text, and data for five years in mid-late April.
- Astound Broadband introduced one-year and two-year price lock options also in mid-late April, though disclaimers on the company’s website said that regular rates apply when the promotional period ends.
Price locks may prove to be an appealing and enduring CX strategy. Innovative Systems’ 2025 Rural Broadband Subscriber Study — which was also released in April, as these providers introduced price locks — named internet speed and service price as the top drivers of satisfaction among rural internet customers. More than half of the subscribers studied — 61% — named “fair price” as a factor in their satisfaction.
