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When MSN Money readers responded to a story about Home Depot's customer service with more than 6,000 message-board posts, we knew we had tapped into a deep well of consumer outrage and a great opportunity to better serve our readers.
The central question quickly became: How can we help to empower the millions of consumers who feel victimized by cutbacks in customer service and overwhelmed at the prospect of fighting for their rights against giant corporations?
Columnist Scott Burns got the ball rolling by asking readers to nominate companies with the worst customer service, and readers responded with more than 3,000 votes for 410 companies.
We then took the 20 companies that received the most nominations and asked pollster Zogby International to conduct an online national survey in which 5,147 randomly chosen respondents rated customer service at each of those companies. The response choices: "excellent," "good," "fair," "poor," "not familiar" and "not sure." The poll, conducted April 2-4, has a margin of error of 1.4 percentage points.
We eliminated the responses "not familiar" and "not sure" from our tallies to focus attention on the responses of customers who expressed opinions. From there, we ranked the companies based on the percentage of respondents with opinions who rated a company's customer service as "poor."
We awarded "dishonorable mentions" to companies that didn't rank in the Bottom 10 but whose service was rated "poor" by at least 10% of respondents who expressed an opinion. Two companies of the original 20 nominees, Target and Lowe's, had only 8% "poor" ratings and thus avoided receiving dishonorable mentions. Two other companies, Charter Communications and the Dish Network, were eliminated from the list because more than 75% of respondents selected "not familiar" or "not sure" when asked to rate their service.
Here's a look at our full results:
| "Poor" | "Fair" | "Good" | "Excellent" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Bottom 10 | ||||
Sprint Nextel | 40% | 28% | 25% | 7% |
Bank of America | 30% | 25% | 32% | 13% |
Comcast | 30% | 33% | 28% | 10% |
Time Warner Cable | 29% | 35% | 28% | 8% |
AT&T | 26% | 36% | 31% | 7% |
Citibank | 24% | 34% | 35% | 8% |
Wal-Mart | 23% | 32% | 32% | 13% |
Verizon | 22% | 31% | 36% | 11% |
Wells Fargo | 21% | 27% | 38% | 14% |
DirecTV | 20% | 29% | 33% | 17% |
Dishonorable mentions | ||||
Dell | 19% | 26% | 40% | 15% |
Circuit City | 19% | 35% | 39% | 8% |
Best Buy | 14% | 31% | 42% | 13% |
Home Depot | 13% | 29% | 43% | 14% |
Sears | 12% | 33% | 45% | 10% |
Macy's | 10% | 30% | 47% | 13% |
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