It must be the season of good cheer.

Still feeling the warmth from the holiday hug from Gizmodo, Sprint received another good news gift this week from Pali Research.

Walter Piecyk at Pali issued a report headlined: “Sprint maintains #1 spot in customer care survey.”

Santa keeps his list of who has been naughty and nice. Few observers keep a closer watch than the team at Pali on how well wireless companies take care of customer concerns.

Over the past three years, Pali has been placing thousands of calls to wireless companies and measuring how quickly they were answered. It’s a good measure, Pali says, of how well the companies are improving the way they serve customers.

In the last survey, Sprint jumped from last place to first. This time around, Sprint answered 89 percent of 1,000 calls to its main customer care operation in less than 30 seconds. No other rival topped 80 percent.

“Sprint’s performance over the past 2 surveys is well above the prior 5 surveys that were conducted when Gary Forsee was CEO and the company answered a little over half of calls to customer care in less than 30 seconds,” Piecyk wrote.

T-Mobile’s response times improved, increasing to 79 percent from 43 percent in the third quarter.

Verizon Wireless deteriorated to 68 percent from 85 percent in the last survey.

“AT&T continued to have the worst response times, but its results improved to 43% from 33% due to greatly improved response times in the morning and early afternoon,” Piecyk wrote. “AT&T’s response times are very poor after 2PM.”