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The Dirty Secrets Of America's Best Companies

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Nobody's perfect, and that's even true of America's best companies. So when I recently identified the 20 best businesses for customer service, I knew there was another side to the story.

I mean, could they really be that good?

In fact, America's top-rated companies have a few secrets when it comes to customer service. Internet search engines can help you uncover them. I'll spill the beans in just a moment.

As a refresher, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) compiled a list of its 20 best companies exclusively for Forbes. The best industries as a whole were supermarkets, restaurants, and car manufacturers. But when I asked my ACSI friends to generate a list of the 20 worst, they balked. ("It's going to pull companies from just telecom and airlines," a spokeswoman confided before politely declining the opportunity to shame corporate America.)

Oh, well.

Here are the airline scores and the telecom grades for your reading pleasure. Note the companies with the worst scores. It's amazing that we bother to fly or communicate at all, given how awful the service is. (No wonder, also, that as a consumer advocate, my two specialties are travel and technology.)

The dark side of America's best companies

To find out the terrible things customers say about the best companies, I consulted with SEMRush, which develops digital marketing tools. SEMRush tabulated the number of semantically negative search requests, like "low quality" and "problems." Then it divided the number of negative search requests by the total number of searches for a particular brand, leaving the company in question with an average share of negative search requests.

"When things break or don't work as expected, people start searching for solutions," explains Eugene Levin, the chief strategy officer for SEMRush. "They put the problem as a keyword."

Here are the five worst companies for negative search sentiment among our ACSI top 20 list of best companies. I've ranked them in reverse order for dramatic effect:

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

5. Lexus

ACSI Ranking: 5

Reason for negative sentiment: When Lexus cars break down, its internet-savvy customers go online to look for answers. They ask questions about their specific car type and any recall or known defect, which runs up Lexus' numbers. It has the highest negative sentiment of any luxury car manufacturer, but curiously also the best customer service. I'll explain how that makes sense in a sec.

Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

4. Subaru

ACSI Ranking: 11

Reason for negative sentiment: More or less the same as Lexus. It's owners who are looking for a fix for their car, turning to Google for help. And like Lexus, even with all the negative sentiment, Subaru still ranks highly for customer service.

Akio Kon/Bloomberg

3. Toyota

ACSI Ranking: 8

Reason for negative sentiment: Are you starting to see a pattern? "There's a higher probability that you will look for a solution to your car problem online," says Levin. "You may not be able to find a solution for a flat tire or a transmission problem -- but you might find a software update that fixes your iPhone." But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg

2. Apple

ACSI Ranking: 13

Reason for negative sentiment: Even the top-rated consumer electronics break but, unlike cars, a fix may be readily available online. Actually, being on this list can mean that the company is good. How so? "Good companies that really care about the quality of the products have more brand awareness," says Levin. "So you'll see more searches for the brand." Apple is one such example.

1. LG

ACSI Ranking: 15

Reason for negative sentiment: Again, it's the category, not the company, according to SEMRush. "You would expect to find more searches for LG," says Levin. Compared with another company on the ACSI list, like L Brands (owner of Victoria's Secret), it's understandable that LG would rank highly. "When people buy Victoria's Secret goods, they know what they're buying," says Levin. "It's not the same as consumer electronics -- there might be some surprises." (Well, with Victoria's Secret, there might be some surprises, but they'll be different than with consumer electronics.)

SEMRush cautions that consumers shouldn't assume a negative search sentiment equals a substandard product, particularly for America's best companies. It's more a function of the industry category and the way customers use search to find solutions. Companies like Texas Roadhouse and Thrivent Financial, ranked dead last on the SEMRush list (see below) do not attract a lot of internet users who are trying to find out why their steak was undercooked or their last bill was delayed.

The takeaway?

"Even the best brands break," says Levin. "Even if you buy a product from the most trusted brand, you're not 100 guaranteed to be satisfied."

Companies with the most negative search sentiment (via SEMRush).

SEMRush

Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can't. He's the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes weekly columns for King Features Syndicate, USA Today, and the Washington Post. If you have a consumer problem you can't solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.