The 12 Biggest Customer Service Failures of the Year

At 247WallStreet.com, Charles B. Stockdale tallies up the dozen retailers that suffered the biggest declines in customer service rankings in 2011. 

It's a pretty interesting list, including some companies that are actually customer service winners with plenty of room to spare: Amazon's rating, which Stockdale derives from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, went down 1.1 percent, but the online bookseller started by hero of freedom Jeff Bezos still has the highest score among all e-commerce and retail trade companies.

There are also a few expected basement dwellers (such as CVS, which in my experience offers a shopping experience even less pleasant than Rite-Aid's); both Wals (-green and –Mart); one company whose ranking may only be dropping because more people are shopping there and absorbing the low-rent ambience (Dollar General, which I'd doubt anybody ever patronized for the friendly service and about which Stockdale concedes "[C]ustomer satisfaction concerns have done little to slow sales"); most of an entire sector (Office Depot and Staples, which together make up the majority of the U.S. office supplies market, clocking in at number 8 and number 7 respectively);  and at Number One by a wide distance, our era's greatest cautionary tale of customer service gone wrong: 

12. Amazon.com
11. Charles Schwab
10. Winn-Dixie
9. CVS Caremark
8. Office Depot
7. Staples
6. Dollar General
5. Expedia
4. Walgreen
3. Barnes & Noble
2. Walmart
1. Netflix

Full story, with comments. Any such list that doesn't include Time Warner Cable and every broadband/telecom company in the solar system should be viewed with suspicion. But again, this is just a list of 2011's biggest decliners, not the worst of the worst. 

Who else sucks? Should Reason's server squirrels be on the list? Bellyache in the comments. (And if you like our service, tell a friend!)