America’s Top Hated Companies: Comcast, Bank of America, Mylan Lead Survey

Financial news website 24/7 Wall St., which assesses customer service for U.S. citizens, compiled a list of the 12 most hated companies by customers, employees, and the general public. According to its findings, telecommunications conglomerate Comcast topped the list, followed by Bank of America, Mylan, McDonald's, Wells Fargo, Facebook, Sprint, DISH Network, Sears, Sprint, Walmart and Charter Communications.

24/7 Wall St. based its rankings on not just its own annual customer satisfaction survey which was executed in partnership with a research company called Zogby Analytics poll, but also on employee reviews on Glassdoor, a site that allows employees to rate their employment experience, and a survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

The cable provider and telecommunication company Comcast which fared the worst, and Sprint, another telecommunication company which ranked 10 on the unenviable list, were the only two companies from over 100 surveyed for the study for which more than half the respondents reported negative customer experience.

However, several companies outranked Sprint despite not having a generally poor reputation for customer service, but instead, because they were in the spotlight due to recent scandals, and faced the scorn and ire of the general public.

Companies such as Mylan, a pharmaceutical giant, which ranked third in the list, faced backlash for keeping a life-saving anti-allergic medication EpiPen, out of the reach for a significant chunk of the public when it raised its price by almost 400 percent.

Similarly, another company, Wells Fargo, an international banking and financial services holding company that ranked fifth, lost the public’s trust after it was revealed it had created millions of fake accounts to inflate performance figures. Facebook (ranked sixth) also tarnished its reputation over reports it permitted and promoted fake news that supposedly affected the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. In principle, the company implicitly conceded that point when it announced it will roll out “a series of new policies aimed at identifying and flagging fake news stories on its site,” according to the 24/7 Wall St. report.

Almost all companies in the list had recent events and issues that overwhelmingly tilted public opinion against them. However, they were other parameters of customer satisfaction where they performed badly.

For example, Mcdonald's (ranked fourth) “made headlines last year when ex-CEO Ed Rensi spoke out against the Service Employees International Union’s campaign to increase the national minimum wage to $15,” the report notes. Significantly, it also “has the worst customer service rating of all 17 industry competitors reviewed by ACSI.”

Other companies such as DISH Network and Sears were put in the ‘hate list’ because they had the worst employee satisfaction scores earned on Glassdoor.

“The risk when you have employees that are generally dissatisfied is that they are not willing to bring their best selves to work, to produce, to be engaged, and to fulfill responsibilities… When employees are generally satisfied in their jobs — we know that there’s a direct tie to the customer experience,” Scott Dobroski, community expert at Glassdoor, said.

Founded in 1994 by researchers at the University of Michigan, in conjunction with the American Society for Quality in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Customer Feedback Insight (CFI) Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ACSI conducts annual surveys that ask 70,000 customers about the products and services they use the most to arrive at data that reflects a benchmark customer satisfaction index spanning over 300 companies in 43 industries and 10 economic sectors.