Here is a list you do not want your company to be on.  From MSN Money:

That reality is borne out in the results of 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.

The winner, or is it loser?  Whatever, it is no surprise:

AOL Time Warner

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 simply have never been a fan of AOL even though I have never been a customer of their’s.

The rest of the infamous list:

I am a customer of 4 of these companies, but one of them stands out for me as being the worst.  I won’t say who.

Sprint

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Some companies focus on hiring from their competition almost exclusively and I am not exactly sure why.  I realize they believe they are bolstering their sales department while depleting their competition’s.  But taken too far, this approach becomes a detriment to a successful hiring campaign.

I’ve seen it with one of our customers who has become infatuated with hiring someone away from a certain competitor.  His desire to do so is driven by the fact that a third competitor recently hired someone from the second competitor.  It doesn’t matter if you tracked that last sentence, the fact of the matter is still the same.

I now refer to this approach as a “trophy hire.”  It doesn’t matter if any of the salespeople from this competitor are strong, a good fit or worth the money it will take to pull them out.  Our customer wants to be able to tell others in the industry that he recruited and hired a salesperson from this competitor.

To be fair, there may be a strong salesperson in this competitor’s company.  We just haven’t found them yet.  In the meantime, our customer has passed on a handful of strong salespeople not from this competitor.

Frustrating.

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