Apple, LL Bean, And Amazon Make BusinessWeek Customer Service List, But So Does Toyota’s Lexus

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 23, 6:52AM EST · Published Feb 23, 5:02AM EST

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The problem with customer satisfaction surveys is that, by their nature, they look back in time and not forward. Bloomberg BusinessWeek announced the results of its customer service poll recently. The project used JP Power data and the magazine’s survey of 5,000 people. The poll covered 200 brands.

The companies at the top of the list will probably not come as a surprise to anyone. They include LL Bean, Apple (AAPL), the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, and Starbucks (SBUX).

The list also includes Lexus, the luxury brand of Toyota (TM). If the survey had been conducted in the last six weeks instead of using 2009 data, the results are likley to have been very different. The public’s view of the car company has worsened by recalls and accusations of a cover-up of safety data.

Insurance companies, usually not viewed as paragons of customer service, did particularly well. USAA and Amica made the top 25. Hotels also did well. Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, and Fairmont made the list. Supermarkets and hardware stores which are mundane retail businesses took four of the top slots–Publix, Ace, Wegman’s Food, and True Value.

Surveys like the BusinessWeek one cannot help consumers determine who may have good customer service in the future. The presence of Lexus on the list shows that. The same might be said for companies with fickle customers like Jaguar and Del (DELL)l. They would have been at the bottom of many customers services polls just a few years ago.

As brokers and mutual funds say on their literature “Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results”

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.