Customer service is critical to a company's growth. However, how an organization approaches customer service may differ dramatically. For example, there is no single approach to providing exceptional customer service for all businesses, and brands can occasionally fall short when attempting to improve their customers' experience. This article discusses seven companies known for having the worst customer service and what they did wrong.
Before discussing what company has the worst customer service globally, let us see what lousy customer service means.
The customers may not know how to explain lousy customer service, but they recognize it when it happens.
It occurs when a company fails to meet a customer's expectations. For example, a customer that receives poor customer service is frequently furious, upset, and disappointed.
According to a poll about companies known for having the worst customer service and approach, the most frustrating aspects of lousy customer service are:
When it comes to customer service, any customer expects to be treated with respect and assures that the problem does not occur again.
It is no longer enough to have a decent product; companies now distinguish themselves by providing excellent customer service.
With the ongoing pandemic, providing quality support is even more critical. Customer assistance requests have increased by 20 per cent since the COVID-19 outbreak.
Buyers increasingly spend time online and at home, and they want to engage with you. The stakes are more extensive than ever, but so is the chance to create a lasting impression.
Some customer service blunders are easy to explain, while others leave customers wondering what the organization thought when they made a mistake in the first place.
While these conversations are often amusing, severe incidents of poor customer service occur far more frequently than one may assume.
In the following, we share a list of companies known for having the worst customer service in the world. Some opinions are based on personal experiences, while others are based on research.
Comcast is a media and technology conglomerate. Xfinity, NBCUniversal Media, and Sky are the company's three primary operations.
According to some customers, Comcast's customer service is terrible. However, it also does not help that the company frequently has outages and long lag times across its product line.
Comcast went viral as one of the companies known for having the worst customer service after Ryan Block recorded himself trying to terminate his Comcast service without success.
Comcast refused to let him stop paying them money for more than ten minutes. Instead, the company apologized after he went public, but not before thousands of people shared their experiences with Comcast's poor customer service.
Sprint Corporation was a telecommunications corporation based in the United States that merged with T-Mobile US.
It was one of the largest wireless service providers in the US, competing with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile US across the country.
"Awful customer service," stated an unsatisfied user of Sprint named Joel Maass on Trustpilot.com.
"My phone would not charge overnight. For the insurance plan, I was paying USD 17 per month. I was on the phone for 6 hours and was passed around to 30 different people"!
Maass continues: "The insurance plan held the carrier accountable for the problem, and the carrier held the insurance plan accountable. I was offered a new phone for USD 800 every time I requested a supervisor".
Many customer service complaints range from rude customer service representatives to contracts that are impossible to cancel.
Furthermore, the majority of the call centers are in other countries, which has its issues.
Wells Fargo is a diversified, community-based financial services company. They set their goal to meet customers' financial needs and assist them in financial success.
"Very unresponsive and scam customer service," one Trustpilot.com user named Marsol reviews Wells Fargo's customer service.
"They returned the deposits I made, claiming they could not locate the second account. This is absurd".
The frustrated user continues: "The deposits I made were all from the same bank, and they can assign some but not all of them. This is almost certainly a software issue".
"They returned a check from my work and a check from my mortgage account in less than two weeks. Unfortunately, they did not provide us with an adequate explanation."
Customer support is now not the company's number one priority despite assertions. Instead, it features a considerably stricter set of policies that appear impenetrable to customer support representatives.
The organization gives off an air of rigidity; it has its policies and will not stray from them even an iota. It would be a sad situation!
AT&T Corporation, formerly American Telephone and Telegraph Firm, is a telecommunications company based in the US that offers long-distance and other telecommunications services.
AT&T is known for its service problems, ranging from failed calls to poor coverage to contentious revisions to its iPhone data rates. As a result, their customer care contact centers' phones ring nonstop.
However, should you stay an AT&T subscriber? "It's not like AT&T horror stories are anything new," says Liz P Weston, who thinks the company is one of the companies known for having the worst customer service ever.
Those who recall Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, the Operator can recite her catchphrase: "We don't care." We are not obligated to do so. "We're the phone company!" exclaims the narrator.
With that mindset, the company might as well be known as the former phone company!
The Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, headquartered in New Jersey, owns the Days Inn brand.
"I am astonished by the bad customer service that I have experienced from this group," a user named Matthew W Harris writes on hissingkitty.com.
"After being a La Quinta rewards member for a while, I was finally able to set up my account. The experience was absurd since I was repeatedly transferred and hung upon."
"I am quite disappointed with the level of customer service provided here," adds another reviewer named Richard Kowalewski.
"Wyndham is a giant organization that builds its name by accommodating clients, and there is no way to reach a human person who can solve a problem."
"Customer service was nonexistent," says another reviewer named Paula Brando. "I inquired where I might file a formal complaint with the management but received no response."
Charter Communications, Inc. is a telecommunications and media business based in the US that offers Spectrum services.
It was used to promote the company's commercial cable television, internet, telephone, and wireless services.
The only way to terminate your Spectrum internet service is to call them and say "Disconnect Service" at the beginning of the procedure!
You cannot cancel your internet service on the Spectrum website or chat with an agent online. However, spectrum wants to make it as difficult as possible to cancel.
"Horrible service and customer support!" comments April on Trustpilot.com. "I have had a technician out five times to fix my TV and internet service, and it's still not working properly. At times, my TV pixelates, freezes, and does not respond".
The disappointed customer continues: "Now my internet is crazy because I pay for 400MB and get 84 to 107MB every time I speed test! Not by a long shot".
"Therefore, I contact and tell them I will discontinue services until they do something, and all they reply is that you have not given us a chance to fix the problems."
"I will dispatch a technician, but that will be it. I explained that I would be moving in a week and that there was nothing further they could do to keep me as a customer, and she responded no, they were not willing to do anything else. So that's a dreadful level of customer service"!
AOL started with providing email, instant messenger, video search, news, sports, weather, stock quotations, and MapQuest, an online map and directions resource.
It became a trademark of Yahoo Inc. years later. Apollo Global Management, based in Las Vegas, is the new owner of AOL and Yahoo and is known for buying defective elements of substantial conglomerates and reviving them.
Most internet users have had negative experiences with AOL as one of the companies known for having the worst customer service ever, particularly when canceling their accounts.
"I'll never forget calling AOL to deactivate my family's account when my father passed away unexpectedly," a user named Dan Spencer says.
"It had been six months since the death. Because the account was in his name, AOL stated that they needed to speak with him to cancel it. Instead, we stressed how impossible it would be given the circumstances, and they then dared to tell my family that they would not be able to cancel it without proof of death, such as a death certificate"!
As Spencer remembers, the AOL's customer service claimed to have billed their dead father every month for six months.
"We had moved and had not received these, so we requested them to call us as soon as they received the money from him so we could witness a miracle," he continues.
Finally, even after being given all of the information about the security, they refused to cancel the subscription.
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