We just released the 2014 Temkin Experience Ratings, the fourth year of the customer experience assessment. It shows how 10,000 consumers rate their experiences with 268 brands across 19 industries.
Why should marketers care about customer experience ratings? Because there’s nothing more influential to a brand than how its customers view their interactions with it. Try to convince customers that your brand is caring, honest, or trustworthy after you’ve treated them poorly. And if your marketing efforts aim to create positive word of mouth, try to get an unhappy customer to recommend you to others.
Before revealing the best and the worst, here’s how the Temkin Experience Ratings work: We survey 10,000 U.S. consumers with specific attributes so that the overall sample closely matches demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. People then answer online survey questions about companies they’ve recently interacted with and evaluate their experience based on the following three components:
- Functional (were they able to achieve what they wanted to)
- Accessible (how easy was the company to work with)
- Emotional(how did they feel about the interaction)
So here are the best and worst brand awards: Notably, most companies in the best overall brand category fell into the fast food or grocery categories, while health plan and service providers comprised the majority of the worst overall brands segment.
- Best overall brands (highest ratings): H.E.B., Trader Joe’s, Chick-fil-A, Publix, Aldi, Food Lion, Sonic Drive-In, credit unions, Dairy Queen, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, Regions, Sam’s Club, and Starbucks.
- Worst overall brands (lowest ratings): Coventry Health Care, Empire (BCBS), Highmark (BCBS), Medicaid, and U.S. Cellular.
- Most improving brands (largest increase between 2013 and 2014): EarthLink, Regions, Humana, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, and Capital One.
- Most declining brands (largest decline between 2013 and 2014): Coventry Health Care, U.S. Cellular, Marriott, Fifth Third, and Chrysler.
- Industry pace-setters (most above industry average): Kaiser Permanente (health plans), USAA (insurance), credit unions (banks), Southwest Airlines (airlines), and Regions (banks).
- Industry laggards (most below their industry average): DHL (parcel delivery), HSBC (credit cards), Chrysler (auto dealers), U.S. Cellular (wireless), Coventry Health Care (heath plans), and HSBC (banks).
The bottom line: Brands are judged by their functional, accessible, and emotional experiences.
