I am not sure if it's airlines, local phone, or cable TV. I think that I will go with the airlines. Kind of pathetic since they still have a little competition.

Airlines have lots of competition and I rarely have any customer service problems. I tend to be real hit or miss about these kinds of things, though -- either exceptionally lucky or always having trouble.

Your local phone company (Southwestern Bell) is competing for your long distance business.

Cable TV competes with satellite providers.

Generally speaking, there is a broad and consistent lack of service across service providers, despite the U.S. being a large service economy.

As much as the phone companies annoy us, they don't charge $100 to change long distance carriers, or change their features every month to make your phone more difficult to use, nor do they charge you 20 times as much to make a call when you really need to reach out and touch someone.

I can't wait to see even more of these pigs fail.

I'd have to say in terms of poor customer service, prison guards would probably top my list...

In my entire life, I cannot think of a service charge or fee collected by a business that bothers me more than the $100 change fee on non refundable airline tickets. This is particularly true in the computer age. For elite customers, at a minimum, airlines should offer self-service internet changes for free. Think of how much time in terms of work hours it takes for ticket reissues, or if you are at the ticket counter, particularly if you ask/argue with them about paying the fee, and they have to get a supervisor, etc. Airlines could use the no change fee self-service approach to lure elite flyers, and to encourage people to fly more to be in some sort of ellusive elite club reserved for a select few. Why don't they advertise the elite program on tv in markets where people fly a lot, e.g. CNN, etc?

A close second would be hotels charging for local and particularly toll free calls. As you know, Starwoods official policy is that they will charge for toll free calls.

LOL

I also give loan shark collectors a poor rating...

KokoConvict,

Do you know this from experience?





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I have it on good authority the mafia is #1 on the least friendly list, followed closely by ALL cable companies and the Delta RPU bullies.

MisterNice

Well, maybe not, but they try hard.

eg. I know someone with Qwest. She got them to install DSL and she has 2 phone lines. They put it on the wrong line and spent a year trying to get it on the line they'd originally agreed to put it on. They set her lines back to AT&T without her knowledge, resulting in what should have been about a $10 call overseas being billed at around $270. They changed her telephone listing without her knowledge and then told her that to have her name listed against her original primary number, she'd have to pay for them to keep her now-primary number unlisted and for her now-secondary number to be listed!

While they have refunded all money overcharged, the time spent on hold waiting for Qwest to answer their phones alone is way more costly in time than an airline's $100 refund fee.

If an individual's time is worth anything and if attitude counts, local phone companies, in Australia and in the USA, are vastly less customer friendly than airlines.

And koko would know this quite well...

Wrecker drivers. In Houston, these a--holes will strategically position themselves (i.e., hide) near flooding areas, turn their lights off, and wait for someone to go through and get stuck. Then they'll be there to charge whatever they darn well please. I live near one of those flooding areas, so I call the cops to put up barricades. It's my way of shooting the finger at these cretins.

Thanks to the Fifth Circuit's interpretation of a law passed by Congress a few years ago regulating "motor carriers", the state of Texas and its cities no longer have the power to regulate these jerks. They can abuse customers all they want, and there isn't jack that anyone can do about them.

Sorry, buddy, but I can't agree with you on this one. Why is the ticket cheaper? Because you lose flexibility. They are very upfront about it, telling you that if you change the ticket, it's $100, so it's not like they are trying to sneak something past you.

You've agreed to give up the ability to change your travel plans in exchange for the lower price. Whether it's worth that to you or not is something that only you can decide.

I've also found that in situations where I've had to change my flights, even with the $100 fee to do it, it was still cheaper than paying the higher fare that gave me more flexibility.

The National Quality Research Center (http://www.bus.umich.edu/research/nqrc/index.html) at the University of Michigan Business School continously measures the performance of companies in certain sectors of the US economy from a customer satisfaction perspective in a program called the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Q1 2001 was the last time airlines data was published (http://www.bus.umich.edu/research/nqrc/Q1-01.html). Scores (out of 100) ranged from 56 for NW to 70 for WN. The industry was rated 61, the lowest score the industry has earned since the study commenced in 1994. The telecommunications industry as a whole measured 70 with the lowest local phone provider at 61. The cable and sattelite tv industry scored 64 with the lowest cable provider at 62. This suggests that the airline industry does a worse job of matching service and expections than local tv or local phone, validating your assertion. Who scores worse than airlines? �nternet portals come close at 63 but no other private industry (including the USPS) scores lower. Similar measurements were made on the US government in 1999 and the only things scoring worse than airlines are the IRS, OSHA, and the FAA.

Hmmm ....

How about the "customer service" of many Honda or Nissan dealerships, the Department of Motor Vehicles, your state's civil court system, or some of the cheaper fast-lube oil change joints.

There are exceptions, of course, but some other categories come to mind, too: KFC cashiers, snowplow services, longshoremen/luggage handlers at the Port of Miami, the U.S. Customs Service ...

To me, the airlines aren't even in the Worst 20. They can be a hassle, but I deal with worse every day.

And personally, I'm a DL fan ... and overall, I really can't gripe much about their product or performance.