USAA and Publix Top 2016 Temkin Customer Service Ratings

USAA earned the highest score in the 2016 Temkin Customer Service Ratings for the fourth year in a row. These Ratings evaluate the customer service of 277 companies across 20 industries based on a study of 10,000 U.S. consumers (see .pdf with full list of companies). You can see all of the company data on the Temkin Ratings website.

Download dataset for $295 (download sample file)

***See how your company can reference these results
or display a badge for top 10% and industry leaders***

USAA earned the top spot this year for its banking business with a 74% rating, and Publix came in a close second with a rating of 73% In addition to its banking business, USAA also placed in the top ten for both its insurance business and its credit card business. USAA and Publix were joined in the top 10 by True Value, credit unions, QVC, H-E-B, Wawa Food Markets, and Save-a-lot.

Comcast, meanwhile, earned the lowest score in the Temkin Customer Service Ratings for the third straight year. Once again, the company received the two lowest scores in the Ratings, one for its TV service business and one for its Internet service, business both of which received a score of 31%.. Comcast was joined in the bottom by GM, Charter Communications (for both Internet service and TV service), Health Net, Time Warner Cable (for both Internet service and TV service), AT&T, Motel 6, and Spirit Airlines.

Here are some additional highlights from the 2016 Temkin Customer Service Ratings:

The Emotional Decline From New Purchase To Customer Service

How do consumers feel about their purchases and subsequent customer service interactions? To find the answer, we asked 10,000 U.S. consumers about those experiences across 11 different industries. We used their responses to calculate the Temkin Emotion Ratings. As you can see below:

• Across all industries, purchasing provides a more positive emotional response than customer service. The gap in Temkin Emotion Ratings goes from 11 points (health plans) to 49 points (TV/Internet service).
• New car purchases earn the highest Temkin Emotion Ratings.
• Customer service interactions with TV/Internet service providers earn (by far) the worst emotion ratings (6%). The next worst emotional experience–health plan customer service (18%)–is three times better than the TV/Internet service providers.
• Purchasing a new health plan provide the lowest emotional rating of any purchase, but it is also has the smallest gap when compared to the emotional ratings for health plan customer service.

The bottom line: Customer service is an emotional trough.

Congrats to Customer Service Leaders: USAA and Chick-fil-A

Since today is the final day of Customer Service Week, I want to give a shout out to the leaders in the 2015 Temkin Customer Service Ratings: USAA, Chick-fil-A, credit unions, Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Publix, Panera Bread, and H-E-B. Here are the top and bottom scoring organizations.

As you can see in this portion of our recent infographic, customer service plays a hugely valuable role in recovering after a bad experience.

Also, since we just celebrated Customer Experience Day, I want to include a quote from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that explains how CX and CS relate to each other:

Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience. Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don’t need to contact [anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations. You know, I got my book and it’s missing pages 47 through 58

The bottom line: Happy Customer Service Week!

USAA Tops 2015 Temkin Customer Service Ratings

For the third straight year, USAA took the top spot in the 2015 Temkin Customer Service Ratings, which uses feedback from 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate the customer service of 278 organizations across 20 industries (see .pdf with full list). You can see all of the company data on the Temkin Ratings website.

Download dataset for $295 (download sample file)

***See how your company can reference these results
or display a badge for top 10% and industry leaders***

USAA earned the top spot for its banking business, followed by Chick-fil-A in the second spot. USAA was also in the top 12 with its insurance and credit card businesses, along with credit unions, Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Publix, Panera Bread, H-E-B, Amazon.com, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

For the second straight year, Comcast earned the lowest score in the Temkin Customer Service Ratings. The company took the bottom two spots for its TV service and Internet service businesses. Filling out the bottom of the ratings are Con Edison of New York, Cox Communications (for both Internet service and TV service), Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable (for both Internet service and TV service), Blackboard, Frontier, CenturyLink, and Cigna.

Here are some more highlights from the 2015 Temkin Customer Service Ratings:

Congrats To Industry Leaders in Customer Service

Since today is the last day of Customer Service Week, I’m give a shout out to industry leaders in the 2014 Temkin Customer Service Ratings. The chart below shows the leaders across 19 industries, along with where they ranked compared with the 233 companies in the ratings.

The bottom line: Happy Customer Service Week!

 

Comcast (and Telcos) Must Improve Horrific Customer Service

When Ryan Block tried to cancel his Comcast service, he ran into a customer interaction from hell. The call was so bad that he recorded part of it and posted it online. The insanity of the conversation has driven it viral.

My take: I don’t think that the problem is a mis-trained rep, which is what Comcast claimed in its official response. Block is one of many, many people who have suffered through painful interactions with Comcast. The company “earned” the bottom two spots in the 2014 Temkin Customer Service Ratings, falling well below 231 other organizations. This type of pervasive problem stems from systemic issues, not from how a specific rep behaves.

While Comcast is the worst offender, bad customer service is an epidemic across the entire telecom sector, especially in TV service and Internet service. So Comcast is merely the worst of a bad bunch.

The problem with the firms in these industries is that most of them grew up with geographic monopoly power. Without any viable competitors, their operating cultures focused on exploiting customers, not on satisfying them. As competition increased, they reacted poorly by starting a frenzy to acquire new customers and then doing whatever they can to entrap those customers.

Here are three recommendations for the entire telecom industry:

1. Reward customer loyalty, not disloyalty. Any company that provides better pricing and service for new customers than it does for existing customers is institutionalizing disloyalty. Stop this practice. Focus more on holding on to good, loyal customers than pining for new customers. Sales from new customers might decline in the short-run, but the increase in retention and word of mouth will improve the business in the long-run. This revised focus will align internal incentives with a focus on improving customer experience.
2. Build CX competencies, not a new veneer. The experiences that customers see are a reflection of how the company operates. So improving and sustaining good customer experience will requires organizations to build four CX core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Employee Engagement, Compelling Brand Values, and Customer Connectedness. Want to know how you’re company is doing? Complete Temkin Group’s CX Competency & Maturity Assessment and compare your results to our benchmark of large organizations.
3. Benchmark yourself against CX leaders, not each other. If telecom companies compare themselves to each other, then they don’t look too bad. Comcast is only marginally worse than Time Warner Cable or Charter Communications. Stop fooling yourself. It’s not good enough to be better than your peers, they’re also pretty bad. Set your sites on delivering customer service like USAA and Amazon.com.

The bottom line: Telecom firms need to build loyalty, not acquire customers.

 

USAA and Amazon Top 2014 Temkin Customer Service Ratings

We just published the 2014 Temkin Customer Service Ratings, the fourth year of the ratings. It uses feedback from 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate 233 organizations across 19 industries.

Download dataset for $295

For the second year in a row, USAA earned the highest score in the Temkin Customer Service Ratings. USAA’s banking business took the top spot and the company’s insurance business tied with Amazon for second place in the ratings. Rounding out the top 12 companies in the ratings are Chick-fil-A, Publix, H-E-B, USAA (credit cards), credit unions, Starbucks, Costco, QVC, and Trader Joe’s.

The prize for the worst customer service goes to Comcast, which earned the lowest two scores in the ratings for its Internet service and TV service businesses. As a clear sign of collective customer neglect, Internet service providers, TV service providers, and health plans earned 11 out of the bottom 13 positions in the ratings.

The remaining companies with the lowest Temkin Customer Service Ratings are Highmark (BCBS), Time Warner Cable (TV service and Internet service), Coventry Health Care, Charter Communications (TV service), Verizon (Internet service), HSBC (credit cards), US Airways, Qwest (Internet service), Cablevision (Internet service), CareFirst (BCBS).

Here’s how the industries compare with each other:

The 2014 Temkin Customer Service Ratings shows that companies have made improvements in customer service between 2013 and 2014. Led by investment firms, credit card issuers, and insurance carriers, 14 of the 19 industries earned higher average ratings in 2014 than they did in 2013.

The average company improved by 2 percentage-points between 2013 and 2014, with 31 companies increasing by 10 or more points. The companies with the most improvement over last year’s ratings are Humana, Cox Communications, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Apple Store, TD Ameritrade, American Family, KFC, Hyundai, and Food Lion.

Four companies saw their Temkin Customer Service Ratings fall by more than 14 points between 2013 and 2014: Coventry Health Care, ACE Hardware, Staples, and Fifth Third.

Methodology:

The data was collected from an online survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers during January 2014. Quotas were set to mirror the U.S. census data for age, income, gender, ethnicity, and geographic regions of the U.S. population.

Temkin Customer Service Ratings are based on asking consumers the following question about companies with whom they’ve had a customer service interaction during the previous 60 days: “Thinking back to your most recent customer service interaction with these companies, how satisfied were you with the experience?” Potential responses range from 1= “very dissatisfied” to 7= “very satisfied.” Temkin Customer Service Ratings are calculated by taking the percentages of consumers who respond with a 6 or 7 and subtracting the percentage who respond with 1, 2, or 3.

Download dataset for $295

You can view a sortable list of results from the Temkin Customer Service Ratings as well as other ratings on the Temkin Ratings website.

 

Debunking Businessweek’s Analysis of Customer Service

I’ve received many, many emails asling me to respond to an article in Businessweek “Proof That It Pays to Be America’s Most-Hated Companies,” The article analyzes the relationship between stock prices and customer satisfaction scores (from the American Customer Satisfaction Index). The article states that customer service is irrelevant or maybe even negatively influences business results. Here’s an excerpt:

“…there’s no statistical relationship between customer-service scores and stock-market returns. Your contempt really, truly doesn’t matter to these companies, with no influence on the bottom line. If anything, it might hurt company profits to spend money making customers happy.”

My take: It’s a bad analysis. Let me clarify this statement a bit. The actual crunching of numbers, comparing satisfaction scores versus stock prices, appears to be just fine. But good analysis is more than just getting the math right. It’s about making good decisions about the math that you choose to do in the first place and then applying good judgement in how you interpret the results. This article misses the mark on those last two points. Here’s why I say that:

• The short-term movement of a company’s stock price is NOT a good indicator about the long-term success of a company. As matter of fact, it’s not a good indicator of much at all. Stock prices go up and down all of the time, so looking at year-to-date changes in stock price have more to do with the arbitrary time period chosen than with any particular dynamic of the company. What would the analysis look like if it started in November 2012 instead of January 2013, went 14 months instead of 11 months, etc. And what happens if Time Warner’s stock drops 10% over the next month or day?
• The interpretation of the analysis should have been that customer satisfaction scores from the ACSI.org do not correlate with short-term stock prices (at least for the one period that was studied). I would agree. But to look at the results and say that customer service is not important for an organization’s success or even that it might hurt a company is just wrong. That’s more than a stretch, it’s just a bad interpretation of the data.

We’ve analyzed tens of thousands of consumers over the years and have found a really strong connection between good customer experience—which can be measured by satisfaction as well as other metrics—and loyalty (see my posts about the ROI of CX). Yes, there are some companies that can “trap” unhappy customers by doing things such as controlling regional monopolies or roping customers into long-term contracts. If your company has that type of market power, then you may not need to focus on customer experience.

For most companies, however, their customers have a choice. Loyalty is something that needs to be earned and can be extremely costly when it is squandered. Good customer experience increases that loyalty. It may not increase your company’s stock price over the next 11 months, but I’m not sure if anyone knows exactly how to do that. And, if you’re running your company to maximize stock price gains in the short-term, then I’m not going to bet on your company for the long-term.

The bottom line: Customer experience correlates to loyalty, but not short-term stock price

Congratulations to Customer Service Industry Leaders

Today is the first day of Customer Service Week, so it’s a great opportunity to once again congratulate the industry leaders in the 2013 Temkin Customer Service Ratings (60% or more is a strong score):

• Airlines: Alaska Airlines (67%)
• Appliance maker: Whirlpool, Samsung (51%)
• Auto dealer: Toyota (62%)
• Bank: USAA (75%)
• Computer maker: Apple (57%)
• Credit card issuer: USAA (63%)
• Fast food chain: Chick-fil-A (70%)
• Grocery chain: Hy-Vee, Trader Joe’s (69%)
• Health plan: Kaiser Permanente, TriCare (59%)
• Hotel chain: Marriott (65%)
• Insurance carrier: USAA (76%)
• Internet service: AOL (47%)
• Investment firm: Charles Schwab (71%)
• Parcel delivery: FedEx (58%)
• Rental car agency: Advantage (68%)
• Retailer: Ace Hardware (71%)
• Software firm: Blackboard (56%)
• TV service: Bright House Networks (46%)
• Wireless carrier: Virgin Mobile (46%)

I also want to congratulate the organizations that are improving. These firms earned 2013 Temkin Customer Service Ratings that are 15 percentage points or more higher than their 2012 ratings: Citibank, U.S. Bank, Hyundai, Nissan. Citigroup, and Old Navy.

It’s also a good time to reiterate the distinction between customer service and customer experience. I like what Amazon.com’s CEO Jeff Bezos had to say on this topic:

“Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience. Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don’t need to contact [anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations. You know, I got my book and it’s missing pages 47 through 58“

The bottom line: Happy Customer Service Week!

USAA On Top of 2013 Temkin Customer Service Ratings

We just released the third annual Temkin Customer Service Ratings of 235 companies across 19 industries based on a study of 10,000 U.S. consumers (see full list of firms).

Download entire dataset for $295

Company Results

Here are some company highlights:

• USAA earned the top two spots for its insurance and banking businesses. Other companies at the top of the ratings are credit unions, Ace Hardware, Charles Schwab, Dollar Tree, Chick-fil-A, Sonic Drive-In, Hy-Vee, Costco, Trader Joe’s, Advantage, Publix, and H.E.B.
• TV service providers and Internet service providers earned nine out of bottom 10 spots in the ratings.
• For the second straight year, Charter Communications took the bottom spot. The rest of the firms in the bottom five are Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Optimum (i/o), and CareFirst.
• The following companies earned ratings that were 15 or more points above their industry averages: USAA (insurance and banking), Alaska Airlines, credit unions, Advantage, Kaiser Permanente, TriCare, Charles Schwab, and Bright House Networks.
• Five companies earned ratings that were 15 or more points below their industry averages: Apple Stores, US Airways, RadioShack, HSBC, and 21^st Century.
• Twenty-three percent of companies earned “strong” or “very strong” ratings, while 37% earned “weak” or “very weak” ratings.

Temkin Group also examined year-over-year results for the 171 companies that were in both the 2012 and 2013 Temkin Customer Service Ratings and found that:

• Forty-four percent of companies improved their ratings while 47% experienced a decline.
• Twenty companies showed double-digit increases, led by: Citibank (banking and credit cards), U.S. Bank, Hyundai, Nissan, Old Navy, Charles Schwab, Continental Airlines, and Piggly-Wiggly.
• Eleven companies showed double-digit decreases, led by: LG, Giant Eagle, Toshiba, Cox Communications, ING Direct, and Budget.

Industry Results

Here are some industry highlights:

• Grocery chains, retailers, and fast food chains earned the highest average Temkin Customer Service Ratings, while TV service providers, Internet service providers, wireless carriers, and health plans earned the lowest ratings.
• On average, credit card issuers, banks and fast food restaurants improved the most while appliance makers, TV service providers and investment firms declined the most.

Calculating the Temkin Customer Service Ratings

During January 2013, Temkin Group asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to identify the companies that they had interacted with on their websites during the previous 60 days. These consumers were asked the following question:

Thinking back to your most recent customer service interaction with these companies,
how satisfied were you with the experience?

Responses from 1= “very dissatisfied” to 7= “very satisfied”

For all companies with 100 or more consumer responses, we calculated the “net satisfaction” score. The Temkin Customer Service  Ratings are calculated by taking the percentage of consumers that selected either “6” or “7” and subtracting the percentage of consumers that selected either “1,” “2,” or “3.”

Download entire dataset for $295

To see all of the companies in the Temkin Customer Service Ratings as ell as all of our other Temkin Ratings and sort through the results, visit the Temkin Ratings website

The bottom line: TV service providers deliver terrible customer service

IBM’s Watson Hopes To Be Your Customer Service Agent

IBM’s Watson was a runaway winner on Jeopardy, but that game show victory wasn’t the ultimate goal for Big Blue’s analytical monster. It turns out that IBM is focusing Watson’s power on a new domain, customer service.

IBM will be rolling out an “Ask Watson” capability that provides customers with answers across several channels:  Web chats, email, smartphone apps and SMS. Companies will eventually add a voice recognition front-end to Watson, which will allow Watson to answer direct calls. Initial users of the service include Australia’s ANZ Bank, Nielsen, Celcom, IHS, and Royal Bank of Canada.

My take: Yes, yes, and yes! Self-help analytics such as Watson will become a critical, mainstream capability for most large companies.

Natural language processing (NLP) has reached the stage where this type of self-service analytics can provide enormous value for customer service. We already see companies making use of virtual agents/assistants from companies such as VirtuOz and Oracle in narrow domains. Think of a smarter version of Apple’s Siri, an application that can tap into all of the company’s databases to understand who the customer is, what products and services she may own, and any previous interactions that she’s had with the company. Using that information, an analytical powerhouse like Watson should be able to deal with an increasingly larger portion of customer issues.

Will Watson and its peers be able to handle all customer service inquiries? No. But they can be smart enough to understand what they don’t know and transfer the request to a human agent.

The bottom line: Prepare for more interactions with Watson and his friends.

Customer Service Drives Sales

This past week was National Customer Service Week. To celebrate, I’ll start by giving kudos again to the leaders in the 2012 Temkin Customer Service Ratings.

• Publix
• Hy-Vee
• Credit unions
• Chick-fil-A
• H.E.B
• Sam’s Club
• Winn-Dixie
• ShopRite
• Aldi
• Starbucks
• Giant Eagle
• JCPenney

I also decided to look deeper into our customer service data to examine the relationship between customer service and repurchasing. It turns out that we have data on over 90,000 customer service interactions. As you can see in the chart below, consumers that have a better customer service experience with companies are much, much more likely to buy from them again.

The bottom line: If you care about sales, you need to care about customer service

2012 Temkin Customer Service Ratings

Temkin Group has just released the 2012…The 2012 Customer Service Ratings covers 174 companies from 18 industries and is based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers in January 2012.

Congratulations to the 2012 customer service leaders:

1) Publix
1) Hy-Vee
1) Credit unions
4) Chick-fil-A
5) H.E.B
5) Sam’s Club
7) Winn-Dixie
8) ShopRite
8) Aldi
8) Starbucks
8) Giant Eagle
8) JCPenney

At the other end of the spectrum, consumers gave the lowest ratings to Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Citibank, Qwest, Road Runner, Cigna, and Bank of America.

The ratings covers the following industries: Airlines, appliance makers, auto dealers, banks, car rental agencies, computer makers, credit card issuers, fast food chains, grocery chains, health plans, hotel chains, insurance carriers, Internet service providers, investment firms, parcel delivery services, retailers, TV service providers, and wireless carriers.

Temkin Group examined industry averages and found that grocery chains were the only industry to earn a “strong” rating. Retailers, fast food chains, appliance makers, and investment firms round out the top five. But consumers gave very low ratings to TV service providers and Internet service providers.

The research also examines how individual companies are rated relative to their industry peers. Led by credit unions (banks), Kaiser Permanente (health plans), Bright House Networks (TV service), and American Express (credit cards), 15 companies outperformed their industry average Temkin Customer Service Ratings by 10 percentage points or more.

Sixteen firms fell below their industry average by 10 or more percentage points, with Charter Communications (TV service & Internet service), Citibank (banks), Hyundai (auto dealers), Bank of America (banks), and Super 8 (hotels) falling the farthest behind.

Temkin Group also analyzed changes from the 2011 Temkin Customer Service Ratings. Led by computer makers and health plans, 10 of the 12 industries that were in both the 2011 and 2012 ratings improved since last year.

Seventy-five percent of companies that were in the 2011 and 2012 Temkin Customer Service Ratings showed improvement. Fifteen organizations improved by at least 10 percentage points, with these five firms leading the way with improvements of at least 20 percentage points: PNC, Gateway, Toshiba, Farmers, and HSBC. Only two companies had double-digit declines: Edward Jones and Old Navy.

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: Web experience is not good enough for how important it is

Customer Service And Forgiveness

In honor of the last day of Customer Service Week I did an analysis that cuts across two recent reports, Temkin Customer Service Ratings and Temkin Forgiveness Ratings. The question I explored is what portion of consumers are dissatisfied with customer service and are not willing to forgive that company. That represents a group of very unhappy consumers. Here’s the data:

TV service providers, ISPs, and health plans have the most of these very unhappy customers, which shouldn’t surprise too many people. Banks, on the other hand, have fewer of these sulking customers, but they have the highest percentage of customers that aren’t satisfied with customer service who aren’t forgiving.

The bottom line: Don’t count on forgiveness to overcome your customer service miscues

Kudos To Customer Service Leaders

The annual Customer Service Week starts today and goes through Friday (10/7). Given the occasion, it seems like a good opportunity to acknowledge some of the better performers in our 2011 Temkin Customer Service Ratings, which ranks 129 large companies across 12 industries.

First of all, kudos to the top 25 companies in the ratings. led by USAA, Edward Jones, Courtyard by Marriott, and Sam’s Club:

But, overall, companies aren’t very good at customer service and there is a wide difference across industries…

…so I want to give a shout out to companies that most outperformed their industry averages. Led by USAA, Southwest Airlines, Discover, American Express, and Edward Jones here are the top 25:

The bottom line: Happy customer service week!