The Customer Service Hall of Shame

AOL has the worse ranking among companies with "poor customer service," according to MSN Money's second annual Customer Service Hall of Shame, a ranking of companies with the worst customer service, based on a nationwide survey commissioned by MSN Money and conducted by Zogby International.

Comcast was said to have poor customer service by 42 percent of respondents. Sprint, Qwest, Time Warner CAble and Cox Communications also are on the list of "10 worst" performers.
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About 47 percent of people who had an opinion of AOL's customer service said it was "poor." MSN Money writer Karen Aho notes that communications companies and banks that provide complex and at times highly technical products are on the list precisely because those products are so complex.

Still, one has to note that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are not on the list. Without excusing poor performance, consumer customer service is a tough job, hard to do well. As someone who once worked for a system integrator, I can attest that questions sometimes came in that I wasn't sure who was responsible for handling.

I don't think I'd claim we ever did a great job of it. It's tough, dogged work.

In fact, it can be unpleasant work. My wife occasionally gets calls from angry consumers who have a right to be angry, and all she can do is direct them to a department that probably was responsible for the unresponsive behavior in the first place. She knows the service "sucks." But large organizations that really don't care tend not to fix those sorts of problems.

In fairness, all big companies struggle with customer service, for good reasons. It's hard to do well, especially when the average size of any single account isn't large enough to devote as much support as one probably should provide.

Still, one notes that some names did not appear on the list. As tough as it is, customer service is better at some companies than at others. As a personal aside, I'm not sure I can agree with poll respondents who say Qwest customer service is poor. That hasn't been my personal experience at all.

In fairness, though, my contact with Qwest is as a business customer, and business customers get better service.

For the survey, conducted online in March, Zogby asked more than 7,000 people across the country to rate their customer experiences with 140 leading companies in 14 industries, including airlines, hotels, insurance companies and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. Respondents could answer "excellent," "good," "fair," "poor," "not familiar" or "not sure."

The companies in the Hall of Shame were ranked by the percentage of people familiar with a company who answered "poor."

Economy Changes Shopping Behavior

Vertis Communications Vertis Communications says U.S. adult consumers might be changing their physical world and online shopping habits in response to economic conditions.

One might expect further adjustments as higher gas prices start to change behavior as well.

Some 64 percent of consumers say they are shopping closer to home. About 59 percent are combining trips while 51 percent say they are cutting back on luxury items.

About 40 percent say they are making fewer purchases of $100 or more.

About 36 percent buy larger quantities of staples when they shop.

About a quarter are doing more research before buying and 13 percent say they are buying more online, perhaps to save money, perhaps to save gas.

in the US in January and found that 13% of respondents actually planned to buy more goods online as a result of current economic conditions.

Social Media, Text, Email Advertising Up Next 3 Years

More than three-quarters of marketers surveyed by Eloqua say they will increase their social media spending during the next three years. A full 74 percent said they plan to increase their direct email spending while about two thirds will spend more on mobile texting and SMS.

Respondents were bullish on online ad spending overall, with nine out of 10 saying they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets.

The spending increases are likely to come at the expense of print ads, since 55 percent of respondents say they will probably decrease print ad spending in the next three years.

Bresnan Wins Huge Contract: Proves Thesis

Many executives in the competitive local exchange carrier industry do not believe cable operators will achieve much success in the commercial markets, aside from the very-small business that requires as many as eight voice lines and not much more.

Those executives include some of the most-successful, best-respected CLEC operators in the business. But they still might be wrong.

The State of Montana Information Technology Services Division and the Montana University system has selected Bresnan Communications as a provider of statewide data transport services for Montana’s state agencies, local governments, universities and schools.

We are talking about a network with 568 locations, serving 23 different government agencies, 14 college campuses, 40 local government entities and courthouses.

I've maintained for some time that cable operators would prove in their commercial organization in the very-small business space before beginning to move up the value chain. Bresnan's win proves they can do it.

Tell Telecom Regulators How to Make the Internet Better

Sound off. Let government regulators know “How can the Internet make the world a better place?” Post your comments at www.youtube.com/futureinternet.

YouTube users can share their opinion with the leaders and opinion shapers attending the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development "future of the Internet" meeting in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008.

The best videos uploaded to www.youtube.com/futureinternet will be shown to ministers and VIPs at the event. They will be invited to react as well and their answers will be uploaded on YouTube during the meeting.

In Seoul, all participants, including government ministers from more than 40 countries and hundreds of global leaders from international government organisations, business, the Internet's technical community and civil society, will be encouraged to submit their own answers at a dedicated YouTube booth on site.

Global Bandwidth Consumption Grows 63% in 2007

International bandwidth grew 63 percent in 2007, which just about matches the 50 percent annual growth in bandwidth use reported by SureWest Communications, an independent telco, as well as other broadband access providers.

For buyers of global bandwidth, it appears aggregate prices were "stable," as industry watchers note, meaning a decline of 10 percent or in some cases 20 percent on capacity prices. Global bandwidth, especially on well-supplied routes, tends to decline over time as buyers consume more optical products that offer lower price-per-megabit ratios.

However, prices are opaque, and pace of price changes varies dramatically—by route, by service provider, and by bandwidth product, TeleGeography notes. There can be quite a lot of price variation even on a single route, and for a single product, as these prices for London to Paris indicate.

Mobile Social Networking Forecast

In-Stat forecasts over 229.5 million mobile subscribers globally could be using mobile social networking services by 2012. Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, In-Stat says.

Carriers will benefit from wider use of data plans, to be sure. But the more important insight probably is that the handset becomes the focus of attachment. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life, In-Stat argues. If so, carrier brands will be less important than the handset brands.

"The critical issue most mobile social networking site and application developers struggle with is how to make money with their services," says Jill Meyers, In-Stat analyst. "There are three primary methods of revenue generation for mobile social networking applications- advertising, subscription services, and premium upgrades."

Little of that potential revenue is available directly to network service providers, though. And it remains unclear whether social networking actually is the foundation for a revenue stream or simply a really important feature.