The word for June 09 is iBrick
Apple's iPhone before activation. Refers to how useless it is when it can't do anything, and its striking resemblance to a brick.
I can't activate my iPhone, so I'm sitting at my computer crying and staring at my iBrick.
By Karen Aho
The economy's in the tank. Corporate profits are down. Business owners are having just as hard a time getting loans as wannabe homeowners.
"So you'd think that businesses would be treating their patrons like royalty, right? That this would be exactly the right time for businesses to coddle their customers?
"Wrong. When the economic going gets tough, some companies apparently get tough-minded about customer service, squeezing out the last dime of profit by cutting back on critical customer-facing positions such as phone personnel.
"We've seen a fall in customer service as we've gone into a recession," said Richard D. Hanks, the president of Mindshare Technologies, a customer-service consulting company. "As the cost cutting occurs . . . they start to cut the wrong things."
"That reality is borne out in the results of MSN Money's second annual Customer Service Hall of Shame, a ranking of companies with the worst customer service, based on a nationwide survey commissioned by MSN Money and conducted by Zogby International. The scores for our Hall of Shame companies are, on average, down from a year ago.
"And the 'winner' is . . . The company at the bottom of the customer-service heap is Time Warner's AOL. A remarkable 47% of people who had an opinion of AOL's customer service said it was "poor." Analysts said that rating may have something to do with its effort to transition from an Internet service provider -- where it still has more than 9.3 million paying subscribers -- to an ad-supported Web portal.
"I don't know what to attribute that to," AOL spokeswoman Dori Salcido said. "I just do know that we continue to improve customer service."
(Retrieved three days ago here: Click to read the entire report --
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SmartSpending/ConsumerActionGuide/TheCustomerServiceHallOfShame.aspx )
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