Comcast Moves Its Customer Experience Team. Does It Matter?

Comcast recently moved its Customer Service and Customer Experience teams into the company’s Technology and Products division. Charlie Herrin will remain as the chief customer experience officer and Tom Karinshak will remain as the chief customer service officer, but they will now both report into Tony Werner, president of Comcast’s Technology and Products Group.

Werner was quoted as saying

We are making these changes consistent with the guiding principles that have served us well – to move faster, minimize hand offs, reduce overlap and provide clear authority and accountability

My Take: Let me start off by saying that Comcast has little to lose with any reorganization of its customer experience efforts. The 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings show that Comcast continues to be one of the worst companies in the U.S. when it comes to customer experience.

But it’s fair to ask, will this move help or hurt Comcast’s customer experience in the future?

I am often asked about the impact that organizational structure has on customer experience. People want to know what the perfect reporting structure is for a customer experience team. Should it report into marketing? Into customer service? Directly into the executive team?

Actually, I don’t think it matters very much. I’ve seen companies drive successful change with the same organizational structure that led to failures in other companies. Rather than judging a customer experience effort based on how it lines up on a Powerpoint slide, I like to ask questions associated with these four Ps:

• People: Does the CX leader (in this case Herrin) and other executives leading the effort have the CX knowledge and skills, along with the  influence across the company, to be successful change agents?
• Power: Does the organizational alignment (both formal reporting and informal access to the senior executive team) provide the change agents with the ability to overcome thorny obstacles that they are bound to run up against?
• Passion: Does the senior executive sponsor (in this case Werner) have a real understanding of customer experience and a willingness to make the difficult trade-offs that will be required to create and sustain meaningful CX improvements?
• Perception. Does the move signal to the rest of the organization that customer experience is more important to the senior executive team?

If the answer to all four of these is “yes,” then it’s a good organizational structure for the CX team. If any of the answers are “no,” then it’s not going to be successful.

I can’t answer these questions for Comcast, but we will be measuring its customer experience again next year. So we’ll see what happens.

The bottom line: When it comes to transformation, people trump structure.

TV and Internet Service Providers Deliver the Worst Customer Experience

We recently released the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 294 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

TV service providers and Internet service providers received the lowest overall customer experience scores, according to the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings, an annual ranking of companies based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Of the 20 industries covered in the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings, TV service and Internet service providers tied with healthcare providers for the lowest average ratings. These industries have been at the bottom of the Ratings for the past four years, and their scores hit an all-time low this year.

The poster child for poor customer experience in these industries—Comcast—was not only the lowest-scoring TV service and Internet service provider, but was also one of the lowest-scoring companies in the entire Ratings. It ranked 289^th overall out of 294 companies for its TV service and ranked 284^th overall for its Internet service.

Of the 10 TV service companies we looked at, six received “very poor” ratings (below 50%): Bright House Networks (49%), Charter Communications (48%), Verizon (47%), Time Warner Cable (46%), AT&T (43%), and Comcast (37%). And of the eight Internet service companies we looked at, four received “very poor” ratings: Time Warner Cable (48%), Charter Communications (48%), Cablevision (47%), and Comcast (40%).

Voice: The New/Old Human Interface

It started with punch cards, evolved to a cryptic language with phrases such as “c: DIR and CLS,” moved on to point and click, and then reached touch and pinch.

Moving mouses, typing on keyboards, pushing buttons, and touching screens has helped technology become significantly more accessible. But those approaches are still not the ultimate human interface.

While these newer interfaces have much lower learning curves, they still require learning new things. Not only do people need to understand physical interfaces, but they also need to understand logical ones. If you want to watch the TV show “Blue Bloods,” then you need to figure out both the channel and the time that it’s on.

So what’s next?

One of our 2016 CX trends is “Speech Analytics Piloting.” The technology for recognizing, understanding, and responding to human speech has evolved to the point where it can be more practically deployed. In our trends, we identified that analyzing phone calls from customers can uncover amazing insights. But the power of speech goes well beyond just listening and analyzing.

Comcast Needs To Trim Its Customer Experience Action Plan

A few months ago, The Consumerist leaked Comcast’s 10 point Customer Experience Action Plan.

1. Never being satisfied with good enough
2. Investing in training, tools, and technology
3. Hiring more people … Thousands of people
4. Being on time, every time
5. Get it right the first time
6. Keeping bills simple and transparent
7. Service on demand
8. Rethinking policies and fees
9. Reimagining the retail experience
10. Keeping score

My take: As you probably already know, Comcast has terrible customer experience. It’s consistently one of the worst companies in the Temkin Experience Ratings. So I have to start by applauding the leadership team for taking the problem seriously, and putting together a plan.

But the plan is flawed. I’ve already commented on Comcast’s mistaken plan to hire 5,500 new people, which is item #3. The 10 items collectively read like a laundry list of things, instead of a coherent approach and commitment to change the overall culture of the company (see the video, Driving Customer Experience Transformation, Made Simple).

The initial item “Never being satisfied with good enough” falls flat for an organization that is rarely good enough. How does that resonate with the pain that its customers regularly feel?

And the last item “keeping score” is also a red flag. Having and touting a customer experience metric is quite different from using it to drive change. We found that while more than half of the large companies describe themselves as “good” at collecting CX metrics, less than 20% are “good” at making trade-offs between financial metrics and CX metrics.

What do I recommend? Comcast should narrow its focus and make a commitment to be better at a few things that will make a huge difference for customers. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Being on time, every time
2. Get it right the first time
3. Keeping bills simple and transparent

If Comcast can do these things, then its customer experience will improve dramatically. As a matter of fact, if it just gets it right the first time, then I’d expect to see it jump out of the bottom of the Temkin Experience Ratings.

The bottom line: Commitment to a few things is better than a list of many

Comcast: 5,500 New Employees Won’t Fix Customer Experience

Comcast recently announced that it will add more than 5,500 customer service jobs as part of a “customer experience transformation” effort. That’s not the answer to its customer experience woes.

Comcast provides terrible customer experience. While I’m pretty sure that most people reading this post are nodding in agreement based on their personal, anecdotal experiences, we actually have data that shows that the company is truly awful in how it treats its customers. Comcast earned terrible ratings in both the 2015 Temkin Customer Service Ratings (last place out of 278 companies for the 2nd year in a row) and 2015 Temkin Experience Ratings (291st out of 293 companies).

Before I go too far in picking on Comcast, let me say that the problem is endemic across large cable providers, especially Cox Communications, Charter Communications, and Time Warner Cable. As you can see in the chart below, TV services and Internet services industries are the lowest in both overall customer experience and customer service.

Why don’t I think that Comcast can solve this problem by hiring 5,500 service reps? Because the company’s issues have to do more with it’s culture than with the number of people that it employs. The breath of the issues demonstrate a very low level of customer experience maturity across the organization. Unless the company develops a more customer-centric culture, then adding people will at best only create superficial improvements.

So, whats the answer? Comcast (and its peers) need to focus on building all four customer experience core competencies:

• Purposeful Leadership: Leaders operate consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values.
• Compelling Brand Values: Brand attributes are driving decisions about how you treat customers.
• Employee Engagement: Employees are fully committed to the goals of your organization.
• Customer Connectedness: Customer feedback and insight is integrated throughout your organization.

Where’s a good place for Comcast execs to start? Watch this video:

The bottom line: Build a customer-centric culture, don’t just add people

TV Service Providers Deliver Very Poor Customer Experience

We recently released the 2015 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 293 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

The average rating for the TV service providers industry dropped from 54% in 2014 to 52% in 2015—the first time in the history of the Ratings that this industry has declined. As an industry, TV service providers ranked 19^th out of 20 industries.

Here are some highlights from the TV service providers’ results:

• Cablevision Optimum earned the highest rating the TV service provider industry, with a score of 61% and an overall rank of 199^th place.
• Comcast was the lowest-rated TV service provider for the second year in a row, scoring 43% and ranking 291^st out of 293 companies. Comcast also scored the furthest below the industry average for each of the three components, falling 6.7 percentage-points below the success average, 9.3 points below the effort average, and 11.6 points below average for the emotion average.
• Of the nine TV service providers that we evaluated both last year and this year, only two of them increased their scores between 2014 and 2015. Verizon improved by three percentage-points, while AT&T improved by one point.
• Bright House Networks—last year’s top-rated TV service provider—dropped eight percentage-points since 2014, while Cox Communications dropped seven percentage points over the last year.
• Dish Network’s success score declined more than any other TV service provider’s, dropping by 10 percentage-points between 2014 and 2015. Meanwhile, Cox Communication’s effort and emotion score declined the most in the industry; its effort scored dropped by 12 points over the last year, and its emotion score dropped by 8 points over the last year.
• Despite scoring above average for both the emotion and effort component—4.4 and 4.1 percentage-points above average respectively—DirecTV scored 3.1 points below average for the success component.

Internet Service Providers Set the Lowest Bar in Customer Experience

We recently released the 2015 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 293 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

With a rating of 51%, Internet service providers have the lowest average score of any of the 20 industries we evaluated. The industry’s average decreased by 4.3 percentage-points over the past year, down from 56% in 2014. This is the largest decline in average rating for any industry.

Here are some highlights from the Internet service providers’ results:

• Optimum earned the highest rating in the industry with a score of 60%, putting it in 207^th place overall. Optimum is a newcomer to the Ratings, and knocked last year’s winner AOL out of the top-spot.
• With a rating of 45%, Comcast is the lowest-scoring Internet service provider for the second year in a row. Comcast’s score dropped two percentage-points since 2014, and this year, the company ranked 289^th out of 293 companies.
• Of the eight Internet service providers that we looked at both last year and this year, not a single company’s score increased. Verizon’s rating stayed the same at 57%, while every other company’s score declined. Time Warner dropped the most, going down eight percentage-points, while Cox Communications dropped seven points, and AOL dropped six points.
• With a rating of 45%, Comcast is the lowest-scoring Internet service provider for the second year in a row. Comcast’s score dropped two percentage-points since 2014, and this year, the company ranked 289^th out of 293 companies.

H-E-B and Trader Joe’s Earn Highest Emotion Ratings

In a previous post, I defined the three elements of an experience: Success, Effort, and Emotion.

Emotion is a significant blind spot for most organizations. In the Temkin Group report State of CX Metrics, 2013, we found that only 11% of large companies feel that they do a very good job of measuring customers’ emotional responses. Our ROI of Customer Experience, 2014 shows that emotion is the most significant driver of loyalty, especially when it comes to consumers recommending firms to their friends.

We’ve been measuring emotion as part of our Temkin Experience Ratings for four years. Our emotion rating is based on asking consumers the following question:

Thinking of your most recent interactions with each of these companies, how did you feel about those interactions?

Responses range from 1 (upset) to 7 (delighted) and the emotion rating is calculated as the percentage of consumers who select 6 or 7 minus the percentage who select 1, 2, or 3.

As you can see in the list of leaders and laggards below (from ratings of 268 companies across 19 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers), H-E-B earned the highest overall emotion rating of 84%, outpacing second place Trader Joe’s by three points.

At the other end of the spectrum, Empire BCBS earned the l0west rating of 31% and several companies were just slightly better with 32%: Comcast (Internet and TV service), Charter Communications, and US Cellular.

The bottom line: Stop ignoring how your customers feel.

H-E-B Earns Highest Effort Rating, Medicaid Earns Lowest

In a previous post, I defined the three elements of an experience: Success, Effort, and Emotion. We’ve been measuring each of these areas as part of our Temkin Experience Ratings for four years. So I decided to share some insights from the effort ratings component of those overall ratings (you can see this data as part of the Temkin Experience Ratings datasets).

As you can see in the charts below (from ratings of 268 companies across 19 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers):

• H-E-B, Food Lion, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Publix, credit unions, Sonic Drive-In, Trader Joe’s, Dairy Queen, Kroger, Little Caesar’s, Starbucks, Piggly Wiggly, and Regions have the highest effort ratings.
• Medicaid, Empire (BCBS), Coventry Health Care, Highmark (BCBS), Motel 6, Super 8, Residence Inn, Hitachi, Haier, Comcast, US Airways, and Chrysler have the lowest effort ratings.
• Grocery chains and fast food chains have the highest average effort ratings while health plans, TV service providers, Internet service providers, and hotels have the lowest.
• Led by a five point improvement in credit cards, 13 out of the 19 industries improved between 2013 and 2014.
• Hotels dropped eight points from 2013 to 2014, by far the largest of the three industries that declined. the others: parcel delivery services and retailers.

Comcast (and Telcos) Must Improve Horrific Customer Service

When Ryan Block tried to cancel his Comcast service, he ran into a customer interaction from hell. The call was so bad that he recorded part of it and posted it online. The insanity of the conversation has driven it viral.

My take: I don’t think that the problem is a mis-trained rep, which is what Comcast claimed in its official response. Block is one of many, many people who have suffered through painful interactions with Comcast. The company “earned” the bottom two spots in the 2014 Temkin Customer Service Ratings, falling well below 231 other organizations. This type of pervasive problem stems from systemic issues, not from how a specific rep behaves.

While Comcast is the worst offender, bad customer service is an epidemic across the entire telecom sector, especially in TV service and Internet service. So Comcast is merely the worst of a bad bunch.

The problem with the firms in these industries is that most of them grew up with geographic monopoly power. Without any viable competitors, their operating cultures focused on exploiting customers, not on satisfying them. As competition increased, they reacted poorly by starting a frenzy to acquire new customers and then doing whatever they can to entrap those customers.

Here are three recommendations for the entire telecom industry:

1. Reward customer loyalty, not disloyalty. Any company that provides better pricing and service for new customers than it does for existing customers is institutionalizing disloyalty. Stop this practice. Focus more on holding on to good, loyal customers than pining for new customers. Sales from new customers might decline in the short-run, but the increase in retention and word of mouth will improve the business in the long-run. This revised focus will align internal incentives with a focus on improving customer experience.
2. Build CX competencies, not a new veneer. The experiences that customers see are a reflection of how the company operates. So improving and sustaining good customer experience will requires organizations to build four CX core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Employee Engagement, Compelling Brand Values, and Customer Connectedness. Want to know how you’re company is doing? Complete Temkin Group’s CX Competency & Maturity Assessment and compare your results to our benchmark of large organizations.
3. Benchmark yourself against CX leaders, not each other. If telecom companies compare themselves to each other, then they don’t look too bad. Comcast is only marginally worse than Time Warner Cable or Charter Communications. Stop fooling yourself. It’s not good enough to be better than your peers, they’re also pretty bad. Set your sites on delivering customer service like USAA and Amazon.com.

The bottom line: Telecom firms need to build loyalty, not acquire customers.

 

USAA and Capital One 360 Top 2014 Temkin Web Experience Ratings

We just published the 2014 Temkin Web Experience Ratings, the fourth year of the ratings. It uses feedback from 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate 222 organizations across 19 industries.

Download dataset for $295

USAA’s banking business took the top spot and Capital One 360 (formerly ING Direct) earned the second highest rating in the 2014 Temkin Web Experience Ratings, which rates 222 companies across 19 industries. USAA’s insurance and credit card businesses tied for third place.Rounding out the top 13 companies in the ratings are Charles Schwab, Amazon.com, credit unions, TD Bank, U.S. Bank, Sheraton, Ace Hardware, eBay, and Nordstrom.

The award for delivering the worst web experience goes to Coventry Health Care, followed closely by Medicaid. Four of the bottom 14 organizations are health plans and three are TV service providers. The remaining companies in the bottom 14 of the Temkin Web Experience Ratings are Charter Communications, Comcast (TV service and Internet service), Dunkin’ Donuts, Time Warner Cable (TV service and Internet service), Jack in the Box, CareFirst, MetroPCS, Highmark, Adobe, and Wendy’s.

Here’s how the industries compare with each other:

The 2014 Temkin Web Experience Ratings shows that companies have made improvements in web experience between 2013 and 2014. Led by airlines, which increased by nearly 15 percentage points since last year, 17 of 19 industries improved. The two industries that earned lower ratings in 2014 are parcel delivery services and rental cars.

Nearly two-thirds of the 195 organizations that were in both the 2013 and 2014 Temkin Web Experience Ratings improved this year. On average, firms earned an increase of 3.2 percentage points. Eleven companies improved by more than 15 percentage points: Southwest Airlines, Health Net, United Airlines, PetSmart, AOL, Sony, Bright House Networks, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Edward Jones, Cablevision, and AAA.

Six companies saw their Temkin Web Experience Ratings fall by 10 points or more between 2013 and 2014: Dunkin’ Donuts, Avis, Hertz, Jack in the Box, Dollar, and Blackboard.

Methodology:

The data was collected from an online survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers during January 2014. Quotas were set to mirror the U.S. census data for age, income, gender, ethnicity, and geographic regions of the U.S. population.

Temkin Web Experience Ratings are based on asking consumers the following question about companies with whom they’ve had a customer service interaction during the previous 60 days: “Thinking back to your most recent interaction with the websites of these companies, how satisfied were you with the experience?” Potential responses range from 1= “very dissatisfied” to 7= “very satisfied.” Temkin Web Experience Ratings are calculated by taking the percentages of consumers who respond with a 6 or 7 and subtracting the percentage who respond with 1, 2, or 3.

Download dataset for $295

You can view a sortable list of results from the Temkin Web Experience Ratings as well as other ratings on the Temkin Ratings website.

 

AOL Leads Internet Services Industry in 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings

We recently released the 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 268 companies across 19 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

AOL is the highest-rated Internet service provider for the second year in a row, landing in 136^th place overall with a rating of 65%. EarthLink came in a very close second with a rating of 64% and a rank of 144^th after being near the bottom of the list for the past two years.

Download entire dataset for $395

Here are some additional findings from the Internet services industry:

Bright House Networks and DirecTV Lead Terrible TV Services Industry Industry in 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings

We recently released the 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 268 companies across 19 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

TV service providers ended up with the lowest average score out of 19 industries in the ratings.

Bright House Networks continues its three-year reign as the highest-rated TV service provider, earning a rating of 63% and placing 160^th overall out of 268 companies across 19 industries. While DirecTV has always ranked near the top of the list, this is its first year in second place, and it scored a 62% rating and placed 174^th overall. At the other end of the spectrum, Comcast fell from the middle of the pack in 2013 to the very bottom of the pack in 2014, landing in 260^th place overall with a rating of 47%.

Download entire dataset for $395

Here are some additional findings from the TV services industry:

Report: What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2014

We just published a Temkin Group report, What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2014. The report, which includes 19 data charts, examines which companies and industries provide the most bad experiences, what impact those experiences have on spending, and how the negative impacts of bad experiences can be mitigated by good service recovery. The report also examines how consumers share their good and bad experiences with companies as well as with other people. Here’s the executive summary:

To understand the effect of good and bad experiences, we asked 10,000 U.S. consumers about their recent interactions with 268 companies across 19 industries. Results show that Internet services and TV services are the industries most likely to deliver a bad experience to their customers, while grocery chains are the least likely to. At the company level, Scottrade had the smallest percentage of customers reporting a recent bad experience with the company and Time Warner Cable had the highest. More than half of the customers who encountered a bad experience at a fast food chain, credit card issuer, grocery store, or hotel either decreased their spending with the company or stopped altogether. However, our data shows that a good service recovery effort can help mitigate a bad experience. Unfortunately, many firms—especially in the banking, Internet services, and TV services sectors—aren’t very good at service recovery. In addition to the consequences of bad interactions, we also examined which channels customers use to share their good and bad experiences and how these changed across age groups. We then compared these results to survey responses from the past two years. We also uncovered a negative bias inherent in how customers provide feedback. ING Direct, Residence Inn, and Fairfield Inn have the most negative bias in the feedback they receive directly from customers, while Hy-Vee and Hyundai have the most negative bias on Facebook. 

Click link to see full list of industries and companies covered in this report (.pdf).

Download report for $195

One of the most interesting analyses in the report is the look at how service recovery after a bad experience affects the spending pattern of consumers. Here’s a summary of one of the charts showing just how important it is for a company to recover well after making a mistake:

Here are some other insights from the research:

• Sixteen percent of consumers who have interacted with TV service and Internet service providers report having a bad experience over the previous six months. Next on the list are wireless carriers, with 12% of their customers reporting a bad experience. At the other end of the spectrum, only 3% of consumers report a bad experience with grocery chains and 4% report having a bad experience with fast food chains.
• The five companies with the most customers reporting bad experiences are Time Warner Cable (25%), Motel 6 (22%), Coventry Health Care (21%), and Comcast (21%). There were 10 companies with only 1% or less of their customers reporting bad experiences: Scottrade, Chick-fil-A, H.E.B., Whole Foods, ShopRite, ING Direct, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Vanguard, and True Value.
• More than one-quarter of consumers who have a bad experience stop spending with computer makers, car rental agencies, credit card issuers, hotel chains, and software companies. The impact of bad experiences is less costly for parcel delivery services, wireless carriers, health plans, TV service providers, Internet service providers, and grocery chains, as less than 15% of their customers with bad experience stopped spending.
• The industries that are the best at responding to a bad experience are investment firms, major appliances, retailers, and car rental agencies. The industries that are the worst at responding to a bad experience are TV service providers, wireless carriers, Internet service providers, parcel delivery services, and health plans.
• Thirty-two percent of consumers give feedback directly to companies after a very bad experience and 23% give feedback after a very good experience.
• Overall, 25- to 34-year-olds are the most likely to share feedback about their experiences. After a good experience 57% tell a friend directly, 28% share on Facebook, and 18% put a comment or rating on a review site. After a bad experience, 60% tell a friend directly, 31% share on Facebook, and 20% write a review.

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Make sure to recover quickly after a bad experience

USAA On Top of 2013 Temkin Customer Service Ratings

We just released the third annual Temkin Customer Service Ratings of 235 companies across 19 industries based on a study of 10,000 U.S. consumers (see full list of firms).

Download entire dataset for $295

Company Results

Here are some company highlights:

• USAA earned the top two spots for its insurance and banking businesses. Other companies at the top of the ratings are credit unions, Ace Hardware, Charles Schwab, Dollar Tree, Chick-fil-A, Sonic Drive-In, Hy-Vee, Costco, Trader Joe’s, Advantage, Publix, and H.E.B.
• TV service providers and Internet service providers earned nine out of bottom 10 spots in the ratings.
• For the second straight year, Charter Communications took the bottom spot. The rest of the firms in the bottom five are Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Optimum (i/o), and CareFirst.
• The following companies earned ratings that were 15 or more points above their industry averages: USAA (insurance and banking), Alaska Airlines, credit unions, Advantage, Kaiser Permanente, TriCare, Charles Schwab, and Bright House Networks.
• Five companies earned ratings that were 15 or more points below their industry averages: Apple Stores, US Airways, RadioShack, HSBC, and 21^st Century.
• Twenty-three percent of companies earned “strong” or “very strong” ratings, while 37% earned “weak” or “very weak” ratings.

Temkin Group also examined year-over-year results for the 171 companies that were in both the 2012 and 2013 Temkin Customer Service Ratings and found that:

• Forty-four percent of companies improved their ratings while 47% experienced a decline.
• Twenty companies showed double-digit increases, led by: Citibank (banking and credit cards), U.S. Bank, Hyundai, Nissan, Old Navy, Charles Schwab, Continental Airlines, and Piggly-Wiggly.
• Eleven companies showed double-digit decreases, led by: LG, Giant Eagle, Toshiba, Cox Communications, ING Direct, and Budget.

Industry Results

Here are some industry highlights:

• Grocery chains, retailers, and fast food chains earned the highest average Temkin Customer Service Ratings, while TV service providers, Internet service providers, wireless carriers, and health plans earned the lowest ratings.
• On average, credit card issuers, banks and fast food restaurants improved the most while appliance makers, TV service providers and investment firms declined the most.

Calculating the Temkin Customer Service Ratings

During January 2013, Temkin Group asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to identify the companies that they had interacted with on their websites during the previous 60 days. These consumers were asked the following question:

Thinking back to your most recent customer service interaction with these companies,
how satisfied were you with the experience?

Responses from 1= “very dissatisfied” to 7= “very satisfied”

For all companies with 100 or more consumer responses, we calculated the “net satisfaction” score. The Temkin Customer Service  Ratings are calculated by taking the percentage of consumers that selected either “6” or “7” and subtracting the percentage of consumers that selected either “1,” “2,” or “3.”

Download entire dataset for $295

To see all of the companies in the Temkin Customer Service Ratings as ell as all of our other Temkin Ratings and sort through the results, visit the Temkin Ratings website

The bottom line: TV service providers deliver terrible customer service