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The city of Los Angeles' lawsuit against Time Warner Cable has prompted a neighboring community to look at suing the cable provider.

Now the city of Costa Mesa, Calif., is also considering suing Time Warner, claiming that its residents have gotten poor service, too. Complaints had gotten so out of hand, that earlier this year the city council called a public hearing to question a Time Warner representative about the issue.

Even though service has improved over the past few months, the city's attorney said that residents have experienced similar issues as those outlined in the Los Angeles complaint, according to the Daily Pilot, the local newspaper's Web site.

Late last week, the city attorney for Los Angeles filed a suit against Time Warner alleging the company broke multiple laws by providing poor service to its citizens. The city is seeking to collect tens of millions of dollars in fines.

The suit is linked to problems Time Warner experienced after it took over cable systems from bankrupt cable operator Adelphia. Time Warner also picked up some systems through a swap with Comcast, its co-buyer in the Adelphia transaction.

Time Warner increased its subscribers in the Los Angeles region from 350,000 to 1.9 million literally overnight. The company was overwhelmed as it migrated e-mail accounts, resolved billing issues, and transitioned other video and broadband systems to its own systems. The result was allegedly poor service and a doubling in complaints.

Specifically, the suit alleges the company failed to live up to its part of the franchise cable agreement, which requires the company to answer subscribers' calls within 30 seconds and begin repairs of service interruptions within 24 hours of notification in 90 percent of its service calls. The suit claims that less than 60 percent of calls for service were answered on time and that broadband and TV "was so intermittent and inferior in quality that it was not much better than no service at all."

Time Warner says that it's working to improve customer service in the region, but it disagrees with the suit's allegations.

"We're proud of the service we provide to the L.A. area," a spokesman wrote in an e-mail. "We've made great strides in customer service, evidenced by the fact that call volumes are now lower than pre-acquisition levels, despite being apporximately five times larger."

Improving customer service is a big deal for cable operators, especially as they face increased competition from phone companies. Time Warner is one of many companies with several initiatives in the works to improve its service. But will it be too late? Many customers are already ditching Time Warner in the L.A. area and switching to satellite providers. AT&T also provides its U-verse TV and broadband service in parts of the area, which could give some residents another choice.

These availability charts from Keynote Systems show Amazon's U.K. site, top, dropping largely off the Net, then gradually recovering. The U.S. site, the lower chart, showed more intermittent problems.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Pages on Amazon's U.S. and U.K. Web sites sporadically showed an error message like this Monday, as well one saying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was intermittently available, though, so it does not appear to be out of the woods yet.

Update 10:40 a.m. PDT: The "We're sorry!" error page that showed up Friday also is appearing on some other pages. The site is working for me, but not for an East Coast colleague.

Update 10:47 a.m. PDT: Amazon.co.uk now works for me again, though with sporadic errors on product pages.

Update 10:59 a.m. PDT: The company still hasn't responded to my requests for comment, but Amazon acknowledged problems on a forum for those who sell goods at the site: "We are currently experiencing an issue that is causing site performance issues. Our engineers are actively engaged on resolving this issue, and we will continue to provide updates until service has been restored," the company said.

Update 11:07 a.m. PDT: I'm getting intermittent errors again at the main pages, and some product pages of Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. So it's clear that as with Friday, recovery is a fits-and-starts affair, even an hour after the problem began.

Update 11:58 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com and most of Amazon.co.uk are working for me. One curiosity: when the site was really struggling, it was rare to even get the "Sorry!" error page.

Outages are bad, but as eBay learned nearly a decade ago, multiple outages are worse. Over its history so far, though, Amazon generally has a reputation for reliability.

Update 12:28 p.m. PDT: Amazon has posted an "issue resolved" update to its seller community forum on Monday--but it's not about Monday's problem. Instead, it's just got old news, saying that on Friday, Amazon resolved the problem it was having on Friday. Still no word from the company about the second glitch.

Update 1:20 p.m. PDT: Keynote Systems, which monitors the availability of Web sites browsed from PCs and mobile devices, confirmed that Monday's outage hit the U.S. and U.K. sites.

The U.S. outage was a double whammy, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. The first problem showed from 10:03 a.m. to 10:23 a.m. PDT, with site availability dropping to about 30 percent. A second, less severe problem occurred from 10:56 a.m. to 11:09 a.m. PDT, he said.

The U.K. glitch was a single, longer-lasting outage that began at 10:06 a.m. and dropped the site to about 30 percent availability. The site gradually recovered over a period of about two hours to 50 percent, 70 percent, and now 98 percent.

"It stills look like some type of user error or configuration glitch," he said. "The data just doesn't demonstrate any kind of network-level attack."

Update 1:40 p.m. PDT: Amazon confirmed the problem, though it didn't share much detail: "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites on Monday morning. However, we are working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's Web services are not affected."

Update 2:50 p.m. PDT: A reader and I just got more timeouts on the U.S. site, with not even an error message showing. Things still aren't totally up to snuff, apparently.

Also, I added some nicer graphs from Keynote.

Update 3:22 p.m. Amazon has declared the outage over. For details, check our follow-up posting. Updated 12:43 p.m. PDT with further details, including partial site recovery.

Keynote Systems showed Amazon.com's availability drop from nearly 100 percent down to 10 percent or lower at 10:21 a.m. PDT Friday.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com was inaccessible to many U.S. visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday.

The site went offline completely by 10:21 a.m. PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12:45 p.m., the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken.

"At noon PDT, we started to see the site getting better," said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. "We are seeing about 70 percent availability."

One-off outages are no fun, but sustained problems can be a serious problem. eBay suffered outages in 1999 that outraged users and sent the stock down, and even a backup system didn't ward off more problems in 2002.

And for major commerce sites, the problem can have ripple effects. Both Amazon and eBay provide a commercial foundation used by many partners and entrepreneurs.

Expensive problems
Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don't include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

Of course, money lost can be money gained for a competitor. A Sony PlayStation 3 promotion with the Metal Gear Solid 4 game went on sale at 10 a.m. PDT, according to some CNET News.com readers. Another reader went to BuyDig.com to buy a birthday present.

"Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to use the site.

Amazon posted an apology placeholder page for broken links.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Representatives of the company haven't responded to requests for comment.

Amazon sites outside the United States appear to be working, including those in China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Amazon Web Services unaffected
It appears Amazon Web Services such as the S3 storage and EC2 computing services still are functioning, at least for some customers, though the AWS page at Amazon.com isn't working.

"S3 and EC2 continue to function for us as normal," said Don MacAskill, chief executive of photo-sharing site Smugmug. Mashery.com CEO Oren Michels, who uses AWS for several functions and who has several customers who use AWS, reported no problems Friday.

Customers who need to get to their AWS pages can follow a direct link, Amazon said.

The security group WebSense concluded the Amazon problems are "not security related" as far as it's aware. Arbor Networks Chief Technology Officer Jose Nazario was more cautious, though: "I've got nothing on it as to why or what happened. I'm not sure if it's an attack or service outage via failures on their end or what."

What's your theory on the cause of the Amazon.com outage?

News.com staff writers Greg Sandoval, Rafe Needleman, and Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

As cable and phone companies slug it out in markets across the U.S., improving customer care is becoming a core part of their strategies.

For the past few years, cable and phone companies have been neck and neck in many markets. Cable companies have introduced new phone services to compete with phone companies, and phone companies have started offering competing TV services.

On the broadband front, cable and phone companies now offer similar speeds in feeds in many markets. While cable has historically been priced slightly higher than services offered from phone companies, these too are evening out in many markets with various promotional service offerings.

Now, more than ever, consumers seem to be influenced by their perception of a particular company and their own experience with customer care. What's more, the Internet has changed things. It used to be that a single disgruntled customer would influence only a few friends and neighbors. But with the advent of blogs and forums all over the Web, unhappy consumers can find a much wider audience, potentially reaching thousands or even millions.

"Customers are making choices every day," said Rick Germano, senior vice president of Customer Operations for Comcast. "They are trying to figure out which company to go with to get TV, high-speed Internet service, and now phone service. And their perception of who is offering those services is a big driver in who they choose."

Unfortunately for Comcast, its customer service has taken a beating recently. Just last month, the company got the lowest score it's ever gotten on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, a major customer satisfaction study conducted by the University of Michigan. And last week, it ranked as the second worst company in terms of customer care in an MSN Money customer survey.

These results follow publicized tales of a technician sleeping while on the job and a hammer-wielding grandmother going crazy due to poor service. And it also follows accusations that the company throttled BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic.

Germano acknowledged the company needs to improve its service and perception.

"Comcast takes full responsibility for what these surveys are saying," he said. "We don't disagree with the results. And we're listening. We get it. But we look at this an opportunity for us to improve. As a business we have to do it."

Comcast's main competitors, AT&T and Verizon Communications, have faired better in these surveys than Comcast. But that doesn't mean that there aren't pockets of dissatisfied customers.

In fact, my sister who recently moved to a suburb near Boston chose to get her Internet and TV service from Comcast even though Verizon's new Fios service was available in her town. Why? The reason was simple. The Verizon technician who was scheduled to set up her basic phone service didn't show up twice for his appointment.

"I knew from the phone incident that there was no way I was going to get Verizon's Fios service, no matter how good or fast the service was supposed to be," she said.

My sister isn't the only dissatisfied Verizon customer I've heard from. Several readers have sent e-mails and commented on the "Talk Back" of some of my blogs saying they have had similarly bad experiences when trying to get Fios service installed. Verizon executives acknowledge the company has experienced some growing pains, especially as it rolls out its new Fios service. But Tom Maguire, the company's customer service czar, says the company is making improvements.

"I don't think anyone wants to be known for providing terrible customer service," he said. "Everyone wants to do the right thing for the customer. So we have to figure out how to remove obstacles that are preventing us from delivering great customer service every time. If we can't deliver the best product with the best service, the customer will go somewhere else."

Winning customers over
So what are these companies doing to improve?

Comcast has hired 15,000 new customer service agents and technicians over the past 18 months to help the company answer calls and provide service to customers. It has also rolled out new high-tech diagnostic tools for agents in the field and at call centers to help better assess problems. Comcast has also started re-dispatching field technicians if it looks like a certain technician may not be able to get to his next appointment.

Customer service agents are also starting to work on Saturdays and Sundays to schedule and serve customers when it's most convenient for them. And it's offering real time online chat services so that customers can talk live with a customer account executive.

Germano said the company is trying to listen to customers more, and that includes establishing a special team within the company to follow blogs, like the Consumerist.com and online forums where many problems are often reported by customers.

Verizon's Maguire said that his company is doing something similar. Like Comcast, Verizon has a team that monitors blogs. And Maguire himself often answers e-mails from customers with complaints as part of what the company calls a "you touch it, you own it" philosophy.

The phone company is also starting to roll out a new text-messaging system that automatically alerts customers when a technician has been dispatched to a location. It will alert customers if the technician is running late.

In addition, Verizon has made big improvements in its customer care centers. One major change is that it has been staffing the fiber solutions centers, which handle technical issues with the fiber-to-the-home Fios service, with customer care representatives who can resolve billing and enrollment issues.

Verizon also has improved its voice response system to help customers resolve certain issues on their own. And it's given customers who would rather reach a human representative a way to navigate out of the voice response system.

It's implemented a new queue-busting system that monitors the flow of calls into call centers. If a center is getting overloaded with calls, more representatives are added dynamically to handle the overflow calls.

"Our goal is to make it easier for customers to do business with us," Maguire said. "It's more cost effective and better marketing to take care of the customers you already have than to go out and try to acquire new customers. And the magic formula for doing this is really the golden rule. Treat customers how you want to be treated."

Another major trend that seems to be filtering into every major broadband provider is a greater focus on standardizing processes. While local branch offices will continue to handle local service calls and dispatch technicians directly to customers, bigger service providers, such as Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, say that it's important to make sure that best practices are shared throughout the company.

"If someone calls with a problem, chances are good that they are talking to someone in their town," said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "But they will still have the big company experience in that we are sharing what we've learned from our 150 million calls a year to implement best practices that can be shared across the company."

Maguire, who took over as Verizon's head of customer care late last year, said he's already started seeing an improvement.

"Improving customer service is a journey that really has no end point," he said. "We're always striving to do better. But I do think things have gotten better. One indication is there are a lot fewer calls that get escalated to my level than there were when I started."

Someday, browsers will make it easy to retrace our Web steps by providing total recall of every page we've opened. Until then, we get the imperfect history features in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

They're imperfect because they seem to remember every page I've visited except the only one I actually need to return to. At least Firefox gives you a few more options for changing how it records your surfing history. With Internet Explorer, the only two options you get are to 1) change the number of days your history is stored and to 2) clear your history completely.

Tweaking Firefox's history settings
To adjust the history settings in Firefox, click Tools > Options > Privacy. Here, you can reset the number of days the browser remembers the sites you visit (the default is nine), or tell Firefox not to record the data you enter into forms and the search bar. You can also erase Firefox's memory of the files and programs you download. The default in both cases is to remember.

Reset the number of days Firefox remembers your browsing history via the Privacy Options dialog box.

(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)

When you press Ctrl-Shift-Delete to clear Firefox's private data, you're shown seven options, five of which are selected. I usually just want to clear the cache--Gmail sometimes balks at downloading my in-box unless I clear out the browser's store of temporary files.

To change the defaults, reopen the Privacy Options, and click Settings in the Private Data section. Check the items you want to clear, uncheck those you don't, and click OK. The next time you open the Clear Private Data dialog box, your new defaults will be the only ones checked.

Customize the categories of private data that Firefox deletes by default when you click Clear Private Data.

(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)

By default, Firefox shows up to 50 entries in each history folder. You can reduce Firefox's memory consumption (and possibly slow some page reloads) by reducing this entry via the browser's configuration options. Type about:config in the address bar, and press Enter. Scroll to and double-click browser.sessionhistory.max_entries, and enter the maximum number of pages you want Firefox to remember for each site you visit.

Internet Explorer's meager history options
When you click Tools > Delete Browsing History in Internet Explorer 7, you're given five options: Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History, Form data, and Passwords. Or click "Delete all" to clear all five.

Internet Explorer 7's Delete Browsing History dialog box gives you five options.

(Credit: Microsoft)

To change the number of days IE stores your browsing history, click Tools > Internet Options, click Settings under "Browsing history" on the General tab, and click the up or down arrows in the History section at the bottom of the resulting dialog box.

Change the number of days Internet Explorer 7 retains a list of the sites you've visited via the Browsing History Settings dialog box.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Tomorrow: a Firefox add-on that shows all the files downloaded by the current page.

Windows XP's Documents list (a.k.a. "My Recent Documents") and Vista's Recent Items are useful Start menu shortcuts that I'm always forgetting about.

Yesterday I described how to change the number of recently opened files that appear in Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007. But it's even quicker to reopen a file you've worked on recently and its application with a single click of the file's shortcut on the Start menu.

If you don't see My Recent Documents on XP's Start menu, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. Click Customize > Advanced, select "List my most recently opened documents" under "Recent documents," and click OK twice. To show Recent Items on the Start menu in Vista, right-click the Start button, choose Properties, click the Start Menu tab, select "Store and display a list of recently opened files," and click OK.

Show Windows Vista's Recent Items on the Start menu by checking this option in Taskbar and Start Menu Properties.

(Credit: Microsoft)

To clear the list in XP, return to the Start Menu Advanced Properties dialog box, choose Clear List, and click OK twice. Do the same in Vista by right-clicking Recent Items on the Start menu and choosing Clear Recent Items List.

If you would prefer not to have Windows keep a record of your recently opened files, or you'd like to change the number of entries on this menu, you can do so by editing the Registry. Before you begin, back up the Registry by using System Restore to create a restore point.

With your Registry backup in place, press the Windows key (Vista) or click Start > Run (XP), type regedit, and press Enter. In XP, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer. In Vista, the key you want to select is HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer.

In both versions, double-click NoRecentDocsHistory. If no such key exists, right-click in the right pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, and name the key NoRecentDocsHistory.

In the Value Data field, enter 1. When you restart Windows, your recent documents list will be history.

To change the number of files listed on this menu, double-click MaxRecentDocs in the same pane--or if there's no such key, right-click, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, name the new key MaxRecentDocs, and double-click it. Enter the number of documents you want to show in the Value Data field, and click OK.

Tomorrow: customizing the history settings in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Since I tend to reopen files repeatedly, I like Microsoft Office's list of recently used files that appears at the bottom of the File menu in Office 2003 apps, and on the right side of the window that opens when you click the Office button in their 2007 counterparts. (These documents are also accessible via the My Recent Documents button on the left side of Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office 2003.)

What I don't like is the default of four documents that Office 2003 shows on the File menu. Since I'm likely to cycle through more than four files at a time, I reset the number to the maximum of nine. Of course, many people prefer to show no recent documents in this list. Fortunately, changing this setting is a breeze.

To change the number of files shown in your recently opened list in Office 2003 apps, click Tools > Options > General, and change the number in the "Recently used file list" up to the top limit of nine, or down to zero, if you prefer to see no files listed. (See below for a Registry tweak that disables this feature in all Office applications.) When you're done, click O.

Increase or decrease the number of recently opened files listed on Office 2003's File menu via this setting.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The list of recently used files is enhanced in Office 2007 by adding these entries to the right pane of the window that appears when you click the Office button. You can show as many as 50 files in this pane, though they may not fit (my version of Office 2007 defaults to showing the 17 most recently opened files).

The file names are now easier to read because they're no longer truncated by the narrow width of Office 2003's File menu. You're also able to keep certain files on this list by clicking their pin icon on the right. Normally, the least recently used file would drop off the list automatically, as the maximum number of files was reached.

Add more files to the recently used list in Office 2007, or reduce the number to zero to show none.

(Credit: Microsoft)

If you find the "Recently used file list" option grayed out in Office 2003, it could be due to a setting in the Tweak UI add-on for Windows that disables this option. To enable it, double-click the Tweak UI icon in the Control Panel, choose the IE tab, and check "Add new documents to Documents on Start Menu." Microsoft has more information about this in a Knowledge Base article.

Another way to customize your list of recent documents is via a Registry tweak. Just be sure to back up your Registry by creating a restore point before you make any changes. Microsoft provides step-by-step instructions for clearing your list of recently used Office files via the Registry.

Tomorrow: tweak Windows XP's list of My Recent Documents and Vista's Recent Items.

When Robert Pedersen's Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop went on the fritz, he naturally assumed the 5-year Next Day service warranty he purchased would get him instant help from the company's customer service staff.

That was April 18. By May 4, he still had yet to have his guaranteed next-day in-home repair appointment scheduled. And it wasn't for lack of trying. He sums up his frustration on his blog: "Close to a month, 37 different communications, a Certified letter to the CEO of Dell Computers, Inc, and 29 actual hours working directly with Dell Computers, Inc in my attempt to simply get my Dell laptop repaired or replaced."

Pedersen certainly isn't alone. Most people who own a computer can probably cite at least one example of bad customer support or an unresolved technical issue with their PC maker. And to be fair, customer service is one of those thankless jobs. Rarely do we hear or read about good service experiences. Bad customer support is what gets written--or blogged--about.

But Dell seems to get the brunt of the complaints, at least publicly. Formerly a leader in the field, Dell has dropped to the back of the pack of customer satisfaction among PC owners. The University of Michigan releases quarterly reports each year, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), on different industries. Each August it ranks PC vendors, and the most recent ranking put Dell at 74 out of 100. Apple leads PC companies with a ranking of 79. At its peak in 2000, Dell achieved a score of 80.

So what happened? A combination of doing business in a maturing industry, the resource-intensive demands of being a consumer tech company, and the company's evolving business model is likely what tripped it up.

As disaster stories circulate, public perception also becomes a problem (Hewlett-Packard is ranked 76, while its Compaq brand, for example, is actually last at 73 in the rankings, yet you don't hear noisy complaints about their service as often).

"(Dell is) below the industry average" of 75, said professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan. "For a company that has really been a high flyer--they were No. 1--for them to drop is problematic."

Consumer Reports this week ranked tech support among PC companies, and Dell came in third in notebook support with a score of 60 out of 100, far behind Apple with 83. It also trailed Apple's score of 81 in desktop support with a score below 60.

It's not as if Dell's not trying or unaware of customer perception. The company says its own metrics show improvement in the past two years. "But we're not finished. We are going to put much more rigor around our service delivery record and aim to improve so we can meet our customer expectations in this critical part of the business," said company spokesman Bob Kaufman.

Dell is known for actively taking suggestions from customers, and has already poured millions of dollars into improving how it helps its customers. Last month Dell announced the availability of more premium services for consumers for more specialized support, and two years ago the company said it would invest $100 million in tech support and put more resources behind its remote support operation. Experts say two years should be more than enough time to show improvement in customer satisfaction.

Luckily, those same customer service gurus say there are concrete steps the computer maker can take to get customer service back on track:

Decide what you are
The tension seems to lie with Dell's identity: Is it a manufacturing company? Or a consumer products company? Manufacturing companies are always looking at the bottom line. Cutting costs and doing more with fewer resources to squeeze the most value it can.

Consumer-facing companies, particularly technology companies, have to do a lot of handholding with customers. And tech support is resource intensive: it requires knowledgeable people answering the phones helping callers who may or may not know the difference between, say, a USB port and an Ethernet port. To this point, Dell says that 80 percent of the time most computers that have issues, the problem is not the hardware.

Another key to the company's troubles is likely found in how fast it grew, says Donald Rosenfield, a senior lecturer in management and operations strategy at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Dell became the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world in the early part of this decade, but after dominating, has since dropped to No. 2.

"When a company grows, sometimes they don't pay as much attention to all aspects of the process as they should," said Rosenfield. "In Dell's case, they didn't focus on services as much as they should have."

Plus, he said, the focus on cost reduction to stay competitive in a commoditizing industry, didn't help. "That led them to trouble in last year or two, though they have tried to devote a lot more attention and resources to customer service."

Customers love customization
Customer satisfaction can be measured in three basic ways: Price, quality of the product and service, and the fit between customer needs and a company. In his years of doing the ACSI, Fornell says price is the least important. Second-most important is the quality of product of service.

"The one that's the most critical of all is rarely discussed," he said. "The fit between the customers specific needs and wants and what the company is offering." In other words, customization is king.

Dell began business selling made-to-order PCs. You could say there's been a correlation between Dell's customer satisfaction ranking and shift in the company's business model. As the PC industry has matured, as Dell became more popular as a brand, and the company's direct model moved toward offering more mass-produced computers, including now at mainstream retail.

A possible fix for Dell's service woes could lie in more customization, or better product targeting or segmentation. "If you have a good fit between buyer and seller, you have a high level of satisfaction," said Fornell.

Get up close and personal
Another way to improve could be to have more in-person support. Though online or remote tech support is cheaper and sometimes enough to fix a problem, face-to-face service could lead to more satisfied customers.

"A lot of their problems stemmed from, as they expanded rapidly and they tended to outsource their operations, they set up these call centers around the world. I don't think the service they were getting out of them was as good as it was before they did all this expansion," said Rosenfield.

Invest in quality
Of course, there's another way around all of these issues--the Maytag approach, or making products that don't break. Consumer Reports says that all PC companies, from Apple to Lenovo, see the same quantity of service calls generally.

It's a change the Japanese auto industry embraced two decades ago, and Fornell says the entire PC industry could benefit.

"They just made sure customers didn't have to go to dealerships for service and made cars very reliable," he said. "There would probably be a market for a more costly product if it could be demonstrated that it was more reliable and did not break."

What manufacturer wouldn't want that?

Any task you perform on the Web can be automated by writing a script. But you don't have to know how to use Javascript or some other scripting language to create your own custom scripts. The Chickenfoot add-on for Firefox makes it easy for nonprogrammers to devise scripts that do their bidding.

Chickenfoot was developed by MIT's User Interface Design Group. It's similar to the Greasemonkey scripting extension for Firefox, but its scripts tend to be simpler and easier for nonprogrammers to customize.

After you download the scripting engine, click View > Sidebar > Chickenfoot (or press F8) to open the Chickenfoot Script Editor. Enter the script in the top pane of the sidebar, and click the Run icon to activate the script for the current page. You can also run scripts by copying and pasting them into the editor, or by clicking the sidebar's Open icon and navigating to the .js file. By placing the scripts in the Triggers window, they will run as soon as the target page opens in Firefox.

A silly example of a Chickenfoot script is one that changes the image on the Google home page. First you copy the script from the Chickenfoot site, and then you paste it into the Chickenfoot script editor, swap out the image-source URL for the one of your choosing, and click the Run icon. Gone is the universally recognizable "Google" icon, and in its place is whatever image you chose. Not especially practical perhaps, but a neat little trick nonetheless.

Run a Chickenfoot script that changes the "Google" image on the site's home page with the image of your choice.

(Credit: Chickenfoot)

Another Chickenfoot script places an icon at the end of URLs that lead to a PDF download or anywhere other than a Web page. But the real power of Chickenfoot scripts is in customizing those in the various Chickenfoot libraries.

Keep in mind that malicious scripts can wreak havoc on your system, so be judicious in your use of scripts from unfamiliar sources. Likewise, Chickenfoot may be susceptible to cross-site scripting (XSS), so the developers recommend that you create a separate Firefox profile for Chickenfoot, and use the scripts only on sites you trust.

Tomorrow: top online scanners and speed testers.