Is Yahoo Losing Sight of its Customers?

Rita McGrath has been a longtime user of Yahoo services such as Calendar, but is none too pleased at what she sees as the company's "dangerous" blindness towards its customers.

Unfortunately for Yahoo, Rita also writes a blog on Harvard Business Publishing, where she chronicle two unfulfilling, to say the least, customer service experiences with the Yahooligans.

"It is astonishing to me how often companies seem to have a completely tin ear for what they do to infuriate or annoy their customers," she writes, exposing a canned customer service letter she got in response. You've seen these before. They answer a question you didn't ask and ask cheerfully if there is anything more the company can help you with.

Rita asks readers to contribute Yahoo war stories of their own. But here, I'm happy to focus on the subject of bad customer responses in general. What's your worst experience?

Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

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