This article was very timely for me as I had just had a bad experience with the customer service of a major appliance company, and it will most likely influence our decisions in the future when purchasing appliances.  The story goes like this.  My wife and I had come home from a weekend out of town and found that our refridgerator had stopped working.  It was only 6 years old but still one year past the 5 year extended warranty we bought with the fridge (won't do that again).  The service repair shop determined the compressor had "burned up" and gave me the customer service phone number for the manufacturer when I asked for it.  He warned me that they would probably not offer any monetary assistance with the problem since it was past the warranty period, but I said that was ok and I just wanted them to be aware of what I (the customer) considered to be premature failure.  Of course, when I called the number I had to go through a series of automated questions before the computer became confused enough with my responses that it connected me with a human.  The cs rep asked for some information from me then listened as I explained that our relatively young fridge had quit working.  What happened next is what I found to be most disappointing.  The responses given by the cs rep were obviously written/rehearsed to assume I wanted monetary compensation for my problem and they were not going to be able to solve my problem.  Even when I assured the cs rep that I was not concerned with getting money from them and wanted to just share information, she kept stating that they could not give any financial assistance with the problem.  She wouldn't even connect me with her supervisor stating that they would just tell me the same thing.  When asked if they would even note the problem she said she would submit a ticket, but I found it very strange she didn't ask for any information about what was wrong.  As the customer, I felt this company doesn't care about me or whether their products perform or not.  Leaders/managers of companies need to follow the advice of your article to avoid what this appliance company is doing.