Forrester’s 2008 Customer Experience Rankings

This is our second year publishing the CxPi. The 2008 CxPi ranks 114 firms across 12 industries: Airlines, Banks, Credit Card Providers, Health Plans, Hotels, Insurance Firms, Internet Service Providers, Investment Firms, PC Manufacturers, Retailers, TV Service Providers, and Wireless Phone Carriers.

The CxPi is based on consumer evaluations during October 2008 across three areas: 1) usefulness; 2) ease of use; and 3) enjoyability (see the methodology section below).

Here are the full 2008 CxPi rankings…

Forrester's 2008 Customer Experience Rankings

Barnes & Noble took the top spot in the CxPi rankings, just barely beating out USAA’s credit card business. Borders, Amazon, and last year’s leader Costco round out the top five. At the other end of the spectrum, Charter Communications landed at the bottom of the CxPi rankings for the second year in a row. Here are some additional insights about the overall results:

• Retailers take seven out of the top 10 spots. Last year, nine out of the top 10 firms were retailers. While retailers still dominate the top of the CxPi, three non retailers have cracked the top 10: USAA, Hampton Inn, and credit unions.
• Healthcare and TVs dominate the bottom. The bottom 10 companies came from only four industries: four medical insurers (Medicaid, Blue Shield of California, Aetna, and Cigna), three TV service providers (Charter Communications, Time Warner, and Comcast), two ISPs (Charter Communications and Comcast), and one wireless carrier (Sprint). Charter Communications, Medicaid, Aetna, and Sprint were also on last year’s bottom 10 list.
• Several banks made significant improvements. When we compared firms’ 2008 CxPi with last year’s results, we found that a number of companies that had improved. The three firms with double digit improvements were all banks (US Bancorp, SunTrust Bank, and Citibank) and six out of the top seven improvements were made by banks as well.

CxPi Results Across Industries

We also looked at the overall results for the 12 industries included in the CxPi.

Forrester's 2008 Customer Experience Index Results

The industry CxPi data shows that:

• Retailers and hotels dominate. Two industries at the top of this year’s ratings, retailers and hotels, were the only industries to receive “good” average ratings. The two industries at the bottom of the list ended up with “very poor” CxPi ratings: health insurance plans and TV service providers.
• Banks improved and TV service providers got worse. Comparing this year’s data with last year’s results, we found that four industries have improved while five had gotten worse. Banks made the largest improvement; increasing their average CxPi scores by 7%. The average CxPi scores for TV service providers, on the other hand, dropped by 7%.

The CxPi Methodology

This analysis was based on responses from 4,564 US consumers during October 2008. 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:

1. Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how effective were they at meeting your needs? (“Usefulness” rating)
2. Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how easy was it to work with these firms? (“Ease Of Use” rating)
3. Thinking about your recent interactions with these firms, how enjoyable were the interactions? (“Enjoyability” rating)

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 they’ve interacted with during the previous 90 days.

While we received feedback on many firms, the CxPi  only includes the 114 organizations that had at least 100 consumer responses.

The bottom line: There’s plenty of room to improve customer experience which will increase customer loyalty.