These companies topped a list of more than 400 nominated by MSN Money readers. An MSN Money-Zogby poll ranked the 'Bottom 10,' and the 'winner' is . . .
By Christopher Oster

Who hasn't gotten lost on an automated phone line, wandered aimlessly around a store trying to find a sales clerk or waited hours for the repair technician who never comes?

We asked readers to tell us about their worst customer-service experiences, and more than 3,000 responded within 24 hours of our request. Now, with the help of pollster Zogby International, we are introducing MSN Money's Customer Service Hall of Shame, a ranking of the companies whose service is most often rated "poor" by consumers.

The results are in, and one company ranks below all the rest: Sprint Nextel, one of the country's largest wireless-phone carriers.A remarkable 40% of people who had an opinion of Sprint's customer service said it was poor. And Sprint was hardly the exception. All of the companies that ranked in our Bottom 10 had customer service rated "poor" by at least 20% of the respondents who expressed an opinion about their service.

[Below] is the Bottom 10, ranked by the percentage of people who said a company's customer service was "poor."



You'd think that people unhappy with their service would just switch companies, right? Or that 40% of Sprint's 53 million customers would take their business elsewhere. Not so fast.

What many of these companies have in common is that, even though they appear to take their customers for granted, their customers have little choice but to swear and bear it. Want to change your cell-phone company? Be ready to pay up and lose cheap calling to many of your friends. Want to dump your Internet provider? Dial-up service might be your only alternative. Want to change banks? Set aside a couple of days to figure out the record-keeping hassles.

And these companies know it. Bank of America, second on our list, can't resist making acquisition after acquisition, setting in motion a painful process for its acquired customers. The less choice you have, the less pressure companies will feel to offer quality service.


Dishonorable mention

Sprint was among more than 400 companies identified by MSN Money readers this year after columnist Scott Burns asked them for nominees for our Customer Service Hall of Shame. We took the top vote-getters from that list to Zogby, which asked a random sample of 5,000-plus people to rate the customer service of companies on that list.

One company that notably did not make it into the Hall of Shame is Home Depot. It was an article about deteriorating customer service at the home-improvement giant that sparked our interest in customer-service problems. Readers responded to that column, also written by Burns, with more than 6,000 posts in our message boards and thousands more e-mails, most agreeing that Home Depot wasn't properly taking care of its customers.

It turns out Home Depot's customers don't feel nearly as ill-served as some other companies' victims. In the MSN Money-Zogby poll, Home Depot ranked 14^th -- consider it a dishonorable mention -- with 13.3% of respondents who had an opinion calling its service "poor." Rival Lowe's ranked 18^th.

When the original Home Depot story ran, the deluge of message-board posts about miserable customer service caught Home Depot's attention and prompted CEO Frank Blake to post two messages in MSN Money's boards, the first apologizing for our readers' experiences and admitting "we let you down."

For each of the five companies at the bottom of our customer-service rankings, we've posted their responses and created message-board threads to allow readers to pass along their own experiences, good or bad.