Top 3 Worst Customer Experiences for 2014

With more than half of 2014 under our belt, it’s a good time for organizations to stop and take stock of just how well they’ve been treating customers this year.

Has your company been living up to customer expectations? Or are you worried that, like 62% of consumers, your customers will go elsewhere after a poor service experience?

Most Complaints By Company:

An easy way to see how you rank in customer service complaints is to check Onholdwith.com, a site that publishes tweets from people waiting on hold.

You would be hard-pressed to do worse than these three telco companies (frequently the worst offenders), who have delivered some of the worst customer experiences this year:

1. Comcast

What can you say about Comcast’s customer service that hasn’t been said before? Last year, the City of Seattle fined them for not meeting their contractual targets (twice, in fact). This year, Comcast has the lowest customer service scores for its Internet and TV service businesses according to a recent report from Temkin Ratings. And, they scored last place out of 233 companies, according to customer satisfaction scores from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Unfortunately, customers are still feeling the same level of frustration with them.

2. AT&T

This isn’t the first time we’ve written about AT&T, who frequently appears in the list of top customer service offenders:

As that last tweet mentions, there is a better way to provide customer service. Using a call-back solution can dramatically reduce customer frustration levels by simply replacing hold-time with a call-back.

3. Time Warner Cable (TWC)

Another common offender on Onholdwith.com is TWC. They top the ACSI list and score in the top 5 on Temkin’s Lowest Rated Organization, something that comes as no surprise to their customers.

Let’s hope these companies start to make customer service a priority soon. It certainly couldn’t get much worse than this.