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Companies we love in 8 industries we hate

A trip to the bank doesn't have to be a nightmare. Here are the customer service winners in eight industries that customers hate, from airlines to cable companies.

7. Public transportation

Business Wire/File
In addition to its famous pier. Santa Monica, Calif., boasts an award-winning public transit system in the Big Blue Bus line.

Winner: Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica, Calif. (2011)

Chances are, you don't love your bus. But  you might be a little closer to liking it if you commute to work via the Big Blue Bus. The American Public Transportation Association doesn’t do customer satisfaction rankings of public transit.  “It would be like ranking your children,” says APTA spokeswoman Virginia Miller. But it does give out an annual special recognition for a well-performing high-volume public transit system (20 million or more trips provided per year). Last year’s winner was Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica, Calif. Big Blue Bus, which provides bus services to Santa Monica and western Los Angeles, was rewarded for improving its safety record, adding buses and updating facilities, and increasing ridership even after budget shortfalls.

Source: American Public Transportation Association (APTA)

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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