Report: 2012 Temkin Experience Ratings
February 14, 2012 6 Comments
Access the data from all Temkin Ratings research at the Temkin Ratings website.
We just published a new report, 2012 Temkin Experience Ratings. The report analyzes feedback from 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate 206 organizations across 18 industries. Congratulations to the top firms in this year’s ratings: Sam’s Club, Publix, Starbucks, Subway, Chick-fil-A, Aldi, Winn-Dixie, H.E.B, and credit unions.
We added six industries (fast food chains, grocery chains, major appliances, car rental agencies, auto dealers, and parcel delivery services) and 63 companies compared with the 2011 Temkin Experience Ratings.
Here is the executive summary from the report:
Sam’s Club and Publix earned the top two spots in the 2012 Temkin Experience Rankings, with three fast food chains rounding out the top five. We asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate their recent interactions with companies across three dimensions of their experience: functional, accessible, and emotional. Their responses allowed us to rate 206 companies across 18 industries. Only 28% of those companies received at least a “good” rating. Grocery chains earned the highest average scores and health plans dominated the bottom of the ratings. Kaiser Permanente and credit unions most outperformed their industries while DHL and RadioShack fell the farthest behind their peers. None of the companies earned an “excellent” rating for the emotional component, while Charter Communications and Earthlink lead 10 companies falling below the “very poor” threshold in that area. Compared with last year’s ratings, most industries improved, led by a 5.3 point average increase by insurance carriers. When it comes to changes over the past year by individual firms, PNC and Lenovo improved the most while Regions Bank had the sharpest decline.
The Temkin Experience Ratings are based on evaluating three elements of experience:
- Functional: How well do experiences meet customers’ needs?
- Accessible: How easy is it for customers to do what they want to do?
- Emotional: How do customers feel about the experiences?
Here are the ratings for all 206 companies:
Here’s how the industries compare with each other:
Here are the companies that are leaders across the 18 industries:
Do you want to see the data? Go to the Temkin Ratings website where you can sort through all of the results for free. You can even purchase the underlying data if you want to get more access.
The bottom line: Customer experience is improving, but there’s a long way to go
About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
Customer Experience Matters® 
Another great report and set of findings!
Significant information. Thank you! 2012 Temkin Experience Ratings
I find it hard to believe that with 10000 respondents, 7 companies can tie for third place.
Mike D.: Good observation. They actually all have somewhat different scores so we could have shown them as not being tied. But we decided to rank the companies based on their percentages rounded to two decimal places (most of the scores are all different when you look at three decimal places). Why did we do it that way? We only wanted to report the scores down to two decimal places and felt that it looked funny if companies with the same scores were rated differently (which is what we did in last year’s ratings). Also, the differences at that level were so small, that calling them tied seemed to be reasonable. We can change the ranking approach in 2013. What do people think?
Dear Bruce,
Great post as usual, I was wondering if the approach to capture the Customer Experience is different in this post than the one by Megan Burns in The Customer Experience Index, 2012 (Forrester).
If so, is there a way to relate or compare between different indices.
Thanks & Regards
Olga
Hi Olga: Thanks for commenting. I actually created the Forrester Customer Experience Index, but have not followed any of its evolution or results since leaving Forrester. The Forrester CxPi is a good measurement and is valuable for anyone that is using it to gauge overall customer experience. Having said that, I believe that the Temkin Experience Ratings is a more refined and better measure for many reasons: a more robust 7 point scale, a more refined scaling, a better sampling methodology. But, as I said, my information is a couple of years out of date because I haven’t been following what Forrester has been doing with the index.