Forrester’s 2007 Customer Experience Rankings
November 27, 2007 12 Comments
Let me start by saying congratulations to the company that received the
#1 ranking in Forrester’s 2007 Customer Experience Index (CxPi)…
Forrester’s 2007 Customer Experience Index
The 2007 CxPi ranks 112 firms across 9 industries: Banks, Credit Card Providers, Health Plans, Insurance Firms, Internet Service Providers, Investment Firms, Retailers, TV Service Providers, Wireless Phone Carriers. The CxPi is based on consumer evaluations across three areas: 1) usefulness; 2) ease of use; and 3) enjoyability (see the methodology section below).
Here are the full 2007 CxPi rankings…
Costco took the top spot in the CxPi rankings – just barely beating out Borders. At the other end of the spectrum, Charter Communications landed at the bottom of the CxPi rankings. Here are some additional insights about the overall results:
- Retailers take nine out of the top 10 spots. All but one of the top 10 firms in the ranking is a retailer – and the only non-retailer isn’t a single company but a segment of banks called credit unions. Interestingly, all three wholesale clubs – Costco, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and Sam’s Club – made it into the top 10. Another retailer, Walgreens, came in at No. 11 to round out the firms that received an “excellent” rating.
- Communications firms, health insurers, and banks dominate the bottom. Four organizations ended up with “very poor” CxPi ratings: Charter Communications (for both TV and Internet), Medicaid, Cablevision/Interactive Optimum, and Aetna. Two other health insurers (United Healthcare and Anthem), two large banks (Citibank and JP Morgan Chase), and Sprint filled out the bottom 10.
CxPi Results Across Industries
We also looked at the overall results for the 9 industries included in the CxPi. Here’s how they did across all three components of the CxPi …
Our 27 retailers significantly outpaced the other industries with an average overall score of 78%. Retailers owned the top spot in each of the three underlying customer experience categories as well, winning both ease of use and enjoyability by wide margins.
Recommendations
One of the things that the CxPi rankings make clear is that firms have a lot of opportunity to improve their customer experiences. If your company wants to make improvements, here are some items to put on your to-do list:
- Get customer experience on the 2008 agenda.
- Look beyond your industry for best practices.
- Develop an outside-in approach. (Read about Scenario Design in this post)
- Assign an executive leader. (See Lessons Learned From Chief Customer Officers)
- Chart a course toward Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD).
The CxPi Methodology
The CxPi is based on a survey of nearly 5,000 US consumers — and examines three areas of customer experience: 1) usefulness; 2) ease of use; and 3) enjoyability.
Here’s exactly how we describe the methodology in the report:
This analysis was based on responses from 4,758 US consumers during Forrester’s North American Technographics® Online Survey, Q3 2007. The Customer Experience Index (CxPi) was calculated as an average of the indices that came from consumer responses to the following three questions from an online survey:
- Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how effective were they at meeting your needs?
- Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how easy was it to work with these firms?
- Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how enjoyable were the interactions?
Consumers selected responses along a five-point scale – ranging from a very negative experience (1) to a very positive one (5). The individual indexes were calculated by taking the percentage of consumers who selected one of the top two boxes (4 or 5) and subtracting the percentage of consumers who selected the bottom two boxes (1 or 2).
In order to limit consumer feedback to organizations that consumers are familiar with, we only asked consumers about organizations that met the following criteria:
- Firms that they’ve interacted with during the previous 90 days (banks, investment firms, credit card providers, and insurance firms).
- Firms that they’ve interacted with during the previous 30 days (retailers).
- Firms that are their primary providers (medical insurance providers, TV service providers, Internet service providers, and cell phone service providers).
While we received feedback on 175 firms, the CxPi only includes organizations that had at least 100 consumer responses.
The bottom line: There’s a huge opportunity to improve customer experience — especially for health plans, TV service providers, Internet service providers, and banks. Hopefully they’ll do better next year.
recently there has been a similar ranking published in Poland in Manager Magazine. readers were choosing customer service leaders and antileaders on the market in several different sectors. However the survey was conducted only on a small group of 200 respondents. and whats interesting the strong leaders are in the same categories. Company like Borders called Empik has won and the rest were rather big retailers including one a bit premium price retailer Piotr i Paweł, Castorama, Leroy Merlin, Sephora, and Polish Starbucks – Coffee Heaven. This could indicate that people are very fond of shopping and that companies aiming at desinging the best venue (venue management?) for shoppers are leaders in designing customer experiences and understand their customers needs pretty well. In American ranking there are only reatilers on top
I wish I had read this blog before I bought my 52″ Samsung TV. I’ve made a first payment already and after 3 truck breakdowns, 2 no-shows and an attempt this afternoon, via a rented truck(?) 1 1/2 hours after the “latest” time, I STILL DON’T HAVE IT!
Pingback: BofA + Merrill, The Customer Experience Angle « Customer Experience Matters
Pingback: Here Comes The 2008 Customer Experience Rankings « Customer Experience Matters
Pingback: Forrester’s 2008 Customer Experience Rankings « Customer Experience Matters
Pingback: Barnes & Noble Tops Retail Customer Experience List « Customer Experience Matters
Pingback: Health Plans Deliver The WORST Experience « Customer Experience Matters
Pingback: Vanguard And Credit Unions Top Investment Experiences « Customer Experience Matters
Pingback: Forrester’s 2008 Customer Experience Rankings « Craving Fan
Pingback: Forrester Research: Credit Unions lead banks in annual Customer Experience Index « BMI Federal Credit Union Blog
Pingback: Read: Take Stock In Customer Experience Leaders @ Customer Experience Matters « Fredzimny's Blog
Pingback: Akiknél az ügyfélélmény jobb, a tőzsdén is jobban teljesítenek! – Jó kis grafikon | devaizoltan.hu