Who are the top 500 consumer companies?

A lot of the code and process behind the gethuman site is complicated by the ability for anyone to request or provide info on or rate any company. But in fact, most of the companies added by users are not those of interest to the mass-market. If we were to publish these suggested smaller or regional companies, it would open the door to publish all smaller or regional companies. The gethuman database (as it is current organized and managed) would quickly grow to become unusable.

Some day I could change the gethuman site to allow it to categorize unlimited numbers of companies (with excellent search and filtering functions etc), but I'd prefer to first improve the quality and maintenance of the current list. And a smaller list (of say only 500 companies) will get more ratings than a larger list.

For example, I am going to setup this system to make sure that each company is called by a human each week, with and without the shortcut, so we can record how long it takes to get a human. I'm also interested in setting up an automatic call program to have it call each company a few times a day, again as part of our quest for getting the most accurate database available.

In addition to recording hold times at different times of the day, we also ask consumers to rate the quality of service provided, once they get a human. These initiatives will be become important in guiding consumers toward the companies with the best customer service.

But for now, I am looking to define the gethuman list as a fixed set of the most popular 500 companies, as measured by which ones are most contacted by consumers. Note that the Fortune 500 measures list only by company size, and this does not often correlate to being the most popular consumer companies. While the gethuman project allows the creation and management of lists for other countries, it is first focused on perfecting the list for US-based consumers. You will notice that the Fortune 500 includes companies such as British Petroleum, AXA, Allianz, Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, and American International Group. And those are just some examples in the top 20, not counting dozens of other companies I never heard of, listed lower but still on the Fortune 500 list.

Can you help us? Please send us pointers to a list of the most popular 500 consumer companies, ideally derived with an educated guess as to which ones field the most customer service calls from consumers. I have no idea of how to get such a list, do you?

Posted by GetHuman on Mon, 27 Mar 2006 4:43am