Wednesday, January 14, 2009

MSN Money's 2008 Customer Service Hall of Shame

Apparently, when the economy goes south, so does customer service. MSN Money posts a list of the top 10 worst customer service experiences. Here is their list for 2008:
1. Time Warner AOL
2. Comcast
3. Sprint Nextel
4. Abercrombie & Fitch
5. Qwest
6. Capital One
7. Bank of America
8. Time Warner Cable
9. HSBC Finance
10. Cox Communications
From MSN:
The company at the bottom of the customer-service heap is Time Warner's AOL. A remarkable 47% of people who had an opinion of AOL's customer service said it was "poor." Analysts said that rating may have something to do with its effort to transition from an Internet service provider -- where it still has more than 9.3 million paying subscribers -- to an ad-supported Web portal.

"I don't know what to attribute that to," AOL spokeswoman Dori Salcido said. "I just do know that we continue to improve customer service."

I've heard AOL customer service is the worst. If you try to cancel dial-up service, it can get really ugly. My grandma said that she tried to cancel her dial-up service with AOL, and they threatened to shoot a poor, innocent bunny rabbit. But my grandma says crazy stuff sometimes. She told me the same thing when the cashier at Kroger's handed her some coupons. Way to go AOL. Nice work on the dial-up features in 2008.