When you’re stuck on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, you don’t want to waste the precious few minutes of poky Internet access you get each day waiting for content-heavy pages to load. That’s one reason USAA, which offers insurance and banking services to military personnel and their families, just launched its mobile Web service. Along with handheld access to balances, proof-of-insurance cards, and bill-paying services, this gives customers a stripped down site for faster page loads.

The new mobile site is just one way USAA, the top-rated company in our survey, made technology a priority in 2007. Over the past year some 370,000 of USAA’s members began scanning checks on their home computers to deposit electronically—a helpful service especially for people subjected to the vagaries of intercontinental mail. This year the $13.4 billion company will also give customers the ability to send and receive text messages to check their account balances. “We would go completely broke trying to chase our members around the world,” says Craig Hopkins, vice-president for e-business solutions. “They don’t let us put our banks on submarines.”

Other tech upgrades are less visible to customers. Last year, USAA began revamping the software used by call-center reps. The new interface looks exactly like the Web site customers see, which helps reps more easily follow along with customers’ concerns. Already in use in one of the company’s personal-property lines, the new software should also cut costs for USAA. Training that once took six hours on that line’s old system now takes just two.

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In the annals of customer service, 2007 will go down as the year fed-up consumers finally dropped the hammer. In August a 76-year-old retired nurse named Mona Shaw smashed up a keyboard and a telephone in a Manassas (Va.) Comcast («www.businessweek.com») office after she says the cable operator failed to install her service properly. During her first visit to the branch outlet, the AARP secretary says she was left sitting on a bench in the hallway for two hours waiting for a manager. She returned, armed with a hammer, and let loose the rallying cry “Have I got your attention now?” Afterward, she was arrested, fined $345, and became a media sensation, capturing the hearts of frustrated consumers everywhere. (Says Comcast: “We apologize for any customer service issues that Ms. Shaw experienced.”)

Three months earlier, in May, Michael Whitford uploaded a video in which he chooses among a golf club, an ax, and a sword before deciding on a sledgehammer as his weapon of choice for bashing his nonfunctioning Macbook to smithereens. In the video, Whitford, a systems engineer from Chandler, Ariz., says that Apple («www.businessweek.com») declined to cover the repair under warranty, citing damage from a spilled liquid. More than 340,000 people have viewed the black-and-white smash-up on YouTube («www.businessweek.com»). Whitford, whom BusinessWeek was not able to reach for comment, denies in the video that he spilled anything. In early July, he wrote on his blog that Apple had replaced his laptop. “I’m very happy now,” he wrote. “Apple has regained my loyalty.”

Meet today’s consumer vigilantes. Even if they’re not all wielding hammers, many are arming themselves with video cameras, computer keyboards, and mobile devices to launch their own personal forms of insurrection. Frustrated by the usual fix-it options—obediently waiting on hold with Bangalore, gamely chatting online with a scripted robot—more consumers are rebelling against company-prescribed service channels. After getting nowhere with the call center, they’re sending “e-mail carpet bombs” to the C-suite, cc-ing the top layer of management with their complaints. When all else fails, a plucky few are going straight to the top after uncovering direct numbers to executive customer-service teams not easily found by mere mortals.

And of course, they’re filling up the Web with blogs and videos, leaving behind venom-spewed tales of woe. “There’s a certain degree of extremism that’s popping up, [a sense of] I’m going to get results, whatever means necessary,’” says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president of Nielsen Online Strategic Services, which measures consumer-generated media. “Companies can brush these off as being atypical, mutant consumers, or they can say there’s a very important insight in [their] emotions.”

Behind the guerrilla tactics is a growing disconnect between the experience companies promise and customers’ perceptions of what they actually get. Consumers already pushed to the brink by evaporating home equity, job insecurity, and rising prices are more apt to snap when hit with long hold times and impenetrable phone trees. Just ask those who responded to our second annual ranking of the best companies for customer service, which uses data from J.D. Power & Associates («www.businessweek.com»). The average service scores for the brands in our study dipped slightly this year, and about two-thirds of the names that were in both years’ studies were lower. (Like BusinessWeek, J.D. Power is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies («www.businessweek.com»).) EMPOWERED CUSTOMERS

A swell of corporate distrust—exacerbated by high executive pay, accounting lapses, and the offshoring of jobs—has people feeling more at odds with companies than ever before. “[That] has a visceral effect on how customers approach more day-to-day transactions,”

(02-22) 08:02 PST PITTSBURGH, (AP) —

People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.

“It’s one of the big bets we’re making,” he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company’s daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy must become even more advanced.

“They’re dealing with so much information that … the need for machine learning to figure out what’s going on with that data is absolutely essential,” he said.

Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments but also with reseachers in other scientific areas “to help us understand where new inventions are necessary,” Gates said.

Gates plans to retire as Microsoft’s chief software architect in July and focus on philanthropy.