While federal regulators continue their review of the pending merger between Time Warner Cable and Comcast, it’s time to look at how these two companies fared in various customer satisfaction surveys from the last 12 months. We’ll give you a hint: It didn’t go well.

Even though Comcast has previously stated that its J.D. Power scores have improved “more than any other provider in the industry,” the 2014 J.D. Power results for Time Warner Cable and Comcast were not promising.

In the latest rankings for cable TV providers, neither Comcast nor TWC scored better than below average — dubbed “The Rest” by the survey — in “Overall Satisfaction” in any of the four regions surveyed.

The companies fared slightly better in the broadband results, where they managed to score “About Average” Overall Satisfaction ratings in some regions, but could not do better than average in any individual category in any region.

In the most recent annual telecom survey from our colleagues at Consumer Reports, Comcast and Time Warner Cable placed 15th and 16th, respectively, out of 17 rated pay-TV providers.

And then there is the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which not only ranks businesses within their respective industries, but allows you to compare rankings for more than 200 businesses in the survey.

When you sort all of the ACSI 2014 ratings, you see that Comcast and Time Warner Cable aren’t just the lowest ranked among pay-TV providers and Internet service providers, but that they account for the four lowest-scoring spots on the entire year’s survey.

The only silver lining around these rankings is that the two lowest-scoring companies are TWC’s ISP service (54 out of 100) and its pay-TV service (56/100), which come in just behind Comcast’s ISP (57/100) and its pay-TV offering (60/100), so perhaps TWC would actually improve — however slightly — by becoming part of the not-as-awful Comcast?

Of course, if TWC gets absorbed into Kabletown, Comcast won’t have anyone to point at to say “well, we’re not as bad as them.”

[via Marketwatch]