Discover Earns Top Customer Experience Rating for Credit Cards

We recently released the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 331 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Discover delivers the best customer experience in the credit card industry, according to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings.

Discover took the top spot out of the 11 credit card issuers included in this year’s ratings, earning a score of 78% and coming in 28^th place overall out of 331 companies across 20 industries. American Express and USAA tied for second place, each receiving a score of 73% and ranking 90^th overall.

Kaiser Permanente and Humana Earn Top Customer Experience Ratings for Health Plans

We recently released the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 331 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Kaiser Permanente and Humana deliver the best customer experience in the health plan industry, according to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings.

For the second year in a row, Kaiser Permanente took the top spot out of the 14 health plans included in this year’s ratings, earning a score of 67% and coming in 206^th place overall out of 331 companies across 20 industries. Humana came in a close second with a score of 65% and a rank of 247^th overall.

Prudential and USAA Earn Top Customer Experience Ratings for Insurers

We recently released the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 331 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Prudential and USAA deliver the best customer experience in the insurance industry, according to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings.

Prudential and USAA tied for the top spot out of the 16 insurers included in this year’s ratings, each earning a score of 76% and coming in 47^th place overall out of 331 companies across 20 industries. USAA has earned the highest score for insurers every year since the Ratings began in 2011, and this is Prudential’s first year included in the rankings.

Southwest Airlines Earns Top Customer Experience Ratings for Airlines

We recently released the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 331 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Southwest Airlines delivers the best customer experience in the airline industry, according to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, an annual customer experience ranking of companies based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Southwest Airlines took the top spot out of the 10 airlines included in this year’s ratings, earning a score of 73% and coming in 90^th place overall out of 331 companies across 20 industries. Southwest has earned the highest score every year since the Ratings began in 2011, with the exception of 2015 with JetBlue came in first.

Courtyard By Marriott Earns Top Customer Experience Ratings for Hotels

We recently released the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 331 companies across 20 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Courtyard By Marriott delivers the best customer experience in the Hotels industry, according to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, an annual customer experience ranking of companies based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Courtyard By Marriott took the top spot out of the 23 hotels included in this year’s ratings, earning a score of 77% and coming in 38^th place overall out of 331 companies across 20 industries. Fairfield Inn, Marriott, and Radisson all tied for second place, each with a rating of 76% and a rank of 47^th overall.

Examining 10 Emotions, 8 Interactions, and Resulting Loyalty

Any regular reader of this blog likely knows that emotion is a key topic for Temkin Group. We labelled 2016 as The Year of Emotion and operationalizing emotion is one of our 2017 CX trends.

As part of our push to drive more detailed discussions about emotion, we examined the emotions that consumers feel after specific interactions. It turns out that different interactions lead to a variety of emotions which have differing loyalty effects.

The chart below shows 10 emotions that 10,000 consumers selected to describe how they felt after completing eight interactions.

As you can see above:

• Most interactions lead to positive emotions, as the four most prevalent emotions on our list are Happy, Excited, Relieved, and Confident.
• Happy and Excited are the most common emotions.
• Purchasing a new pair of shoes leads to the most frequent emotion, Happy.
• Researching a health insurance plan doesn’t create any consistent emotional response, as the most common emotion (Relieved) was selected by less than one-third of consumers.
• Investigating a mistake in a monthly bill is the interaction that most frequently leads to Angry and Frustrated.
• Filing a claim with a home or auto insurance company is the interaction that most frequently leads to Appreciated and Worried.
• Researching a hotel or rental car for a trip is the interaction that most frequently leads to Confident.
• Researching a health plan is the interaction that most frequently leads to Confused and Disappointed.
• Using a new mobile phone or tablet for the first time is the interaction that most frequently leads to Excited.
• Reaching out for technical support for a computer is the interaction that most frequently leads to Relieved.

We also looked at the loyalty that consumers have to companies based on the emotions that they’ve experienced. The chart below examines the loyalty for each of the 10 emotions averaged across all eight interactions (I’ll examine interaction-specific data in a future post):

As you can see:

• Excited and Appreciated lead to the most loyalty.
• Disappointed leads to the worst loyalty profile.
• The lack of any of these emotions leads to less of both loyalty and disloyalty.

The bottom line: Focus on the specific customer emotions you’re creating.

Data Snapshot: Media Use Benchmark, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group data snapshot, Media Use Benchmark, 2017. This is our annual analysis of how much time consumers spend using different media channels (see last year’s data snapshot).

Here’s the data snapshot description:

In January 2017, we surveyed 10,000 U.S. consumers about their media usage patterns and compared the results to similar data we collected in January 2016, January 2015, January 2014, January 2013, and January 2012. Our analysis examines the amount of time consumers spend every day watching television, browsing the Internet (for both work and leisure), reading books (both print and electronic), reading newspapers (both print and electronic), listening to the radio, reading a print magazine, and using a mobile phone. This data snapshot breaks down the results by income level, education level, and, most expansively, by age.

Download report for $195

Here’s a portion of the first figure from the data snapshot that contains 13 data-rich charts. As you can see:

• Time spent over the last six years with mobile web/apps has increased the most, followed by using the Internet at work and reading a book online.
• Across all of the media activities we track except for using the Internet at work, consumers spent more time doing them in 2017 than in 2016.
• Consumers increased their time reading paper books and magazines by 30% over last year, the largest increase of any activities.
• While consumers increased their reading of newspapers, they also had a jump of 27% in the amount of time they spent reading the news online.

Download report for $195

Report: 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings (U.S.)

We published the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, the seventh annual release of this comprehensive customer experience benchmark. Here’s the executive summary:

2017 is the seventh straight year that we’ve published the Temkin Experience Ratings, a cross-industry, open standard benchmark of customer experience. To generate these Ratings, we asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate their recent interactions with 331 companies across 20 industries and then evaluated their experiences across three dimensions: success, effort, and emotion. Here are some highlights from this benchmark:

• Publix, Chick-fil-A, and H-E-B earned the highest overall ratings, while Health Net, Blue Shield of CA, and Comcast earned the lowest scores.
• When we compared company ratings with their industry averages, we found that Kaiser Permanente, Georgia Power, Advantage Rent-A-Car, and Regions most outperformed their peers, while Spirit Airlines and Days Inn feel farthest behind their competitors.
• The Ratings saw its first general decline in 2015 and then dropped considerably in 2016. This year, however, the Ratings significantly increased, with only seven companies’ scores declining. Fujitsu, Volkswagen, Fairfield Inn, Columbia Natural Gas, and Advantage Rent-A-Car improved the most since last year.
• To improve customer experience, companies need to master four competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness.

Industry Changes in the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings

We used the same methodology for the Temkin Experience Ratings this year that we’ve used for all of the prior years. Every year, the companies in the Temkin Experience Ratings shift a bit, but this year we made some more substantive changes. Specifically, we:

• Combined TV service and Internet service. While we have historically provided separate ratings for TV service providers and Internet service providers, we decided to combine those categories this year. It turns out that many of the companies are in both categories and many consumers purchase those services as a bundle.
• Added streaming media. Given the rise of services such as NetFlix and Hulu, we added a new category that focuses on the customer experience of those streaming media companies.
• Expanded some industries. We enlarged a number of categories to increase the number of relevant companies. We changed the appliance category to TV and appliances to include a larger group of consumer electronics providers. We also included some newer companies into existing categories. We updated rental cars to rental cars & transport so that we could include firms like Uber, and we changed hotels to hotels & rooms to include companies like Airbnb.

Download report for Free You can also download the dataset in Excel for $395

Have questions? See our FAQs about the Temkin Experience Ratings. We also have snapshots on all 20 industries.

Here’s a recording of a webinar where we discuss the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings:

The Temkin Experience Ratings are based on evaluating three elements of experience:

1. Success: How well do experiences meet customers’ needs?
2. Effort: How easy is it for customers to do what they want to do?
3. Emotion: How do customers feel about the experiences?

Here are the top and bottom companies in the ratings:

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

Sadly Saying Goodbye to Pete Winemiller

I just heard that Pete Winemiller passed away, and it hit me hard. I knew that he had been battling cancer, but I thought that he was winning the fight. How could he not? Pete was one of the most positive people that I’ve ever met. The world lost a wonderful man… and a true customer experience trailblazer.

Pete was the Senior Vice President, Guest Relations for the NBA’s OKC Thunder. His work on customer experience focused on the people who were interacting with fans. Not just employees of the Thunder, but all of the people from all of the partners who played some role in the fan experience, including concessions, parking, ticketing, maintenance, and even the police force.

I actually was privileged to give Pete and his team two different CX awards. In 2012, the Thunder earned Temkin Group’s CX Excellence Award. When Pete heard that they had won, he immediately asked if we could provide multiple versions of the award to give to his partners. He brought his partners out during the half-time of a game to share the award with them.

In 2014, the Thunder won a CXPA.org CX Innovation Award. Pete flew in to accept the award and I gave it to him on stage. He was a big man who had a huge, warm handshake. As with all of his accolades, he wanted to share the award with all of the Thunder partners. In November of 2014, I went to OKC with my daughter to participate in the halftime ceremony (I’m on the left and Pete is next to me).

I really enjoyed that visit (you can read about it here). It was great to see Pete operate. He seemed to know the names of all the people who were working at the game. As he walked around the stadium, he was both a cheerleader and a stickler for quality. In his wake, he left a highly engaged workforce, most of whom were only part-time employees.

Pete was a great example of a purposeful leader. He operated with a clear, well articulated set of values. As a result, all of the employees who affected the fan experience delivered on the OKC Thunder’s five service principles (acronym CLICK!):

• Communicate courteously
• Listen to learn
• Initiate immediately
• Create connections
• Know your stuff

We regularly interviewed Pete as part of our research, so you will see snippets of the OKC Thunder’s efforts in may of our reports. One of the most detailed overviews of Pete’s work can be seen in our 2013 report, Lesson in CX Excellence (download for free using the code “ThanksPeteW“).

The world lost a true CX trailblazer and a great human being. I’ll miss him.

R.I.P. Pete.

An Inspiring Mission Is An Employee Magnet

If you want to recruit the best employees, make sure that your organization has an inspiring mission.

Temkin Group recently surveyed 10,000 U.S. consumers about their preferences for a new job. Respondents chose one of these three attributes: the company’s mission, pay level, or new boss.

An inspiring mission was the most popular option–and it wasn’t even close. Here’s what people selected:

• Inspiring mission: 54.4%
• Above average pay: 26.9%
• Great boss: 18.8%

We also examined the responses across age groups. As you can see below:

• Mission is the most important attribute for every age group
• 65- to 74-year-olds is the group that cares the most about the mission
• 25- to 34-year-olds is the group that cares the most about their pay
• 25- to 44-year-olds is the group that cares the most about their boss

Why does Temkin Group care about this? Because attracting the best employees is one of the first steps in building employee engagement, which is one of our Four Customer Experience Core Competencies. Also, as we celebrate The Year of Purpose, we will continue to highlight the importance of meaning for both people and organizations.

The bottom line: Make your mission more inspiring.

An Ugly Uber Lesson In Organizational Culture

In a recent Fast Company article, This Is What Caused Uber’s Broken Company Culture, Uber was described as having a…

“Hobbesian environment” where “workers are pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers.”

While I haven’t investigated Uber’s actual culture, it’s worth examining what could have caused this type of an environment in one of the fastest growing Internet companies. To be fully transparent, I’m an Uber customer who is thrilled with how the company has transformed the taxi experience.

My take: Culture is frequently neglected. Why? Because it often doesn’t seem to show up until there’s a problem. That’s what happened at Wells Fargo, and it is also what appears to have occurred at Uber. Very few leaders set out to create a dysfunctional culture, but they exist in many places.

Every organization has a culture, whether its leaders explicitly attend to it or not. It represents how employees think, believe, and act:

• Think: Employees are intellectually bought-in and understand the company’s vision and why it is important to the company. What is the company communicating?
• Believe: Employees see that leaders are truly committed to what is important to the company. What are leaders demonstrating with their behaviors?
• Act. Employees adjust their behaviors to align with what is important to the company. What do employees do when no one is looking?

In young companies, organizational culture closely mirrors the attitudes of its leaders. If they care about fast growth at all costs or winning through combat, then that’s the context that frames how employees think, believe, and act. If the company is successful, then the culture tends to be strong, as it is implicitly reinforced by that success.

What does strong culture look like? Picture a cult. Behavior isn’t judged on a normal good/bad scale, but on how well people conform to the tone set by its leaders. Inappropriate behavior such as the sexual harassment alleged at Uber can go unchecked, unless it overtly bumps up against a cultural norm. If alleged allegations of wrong doing are not important to the leaders, then they will not be taken seriously or even acknowledged.

To all of the leaders reading this post, especially those who are running young, fast-growing companies, please stop ignoring organizational culture. You’re responsible for much more than financial results. You’re creating an organization that can hopefully endure and add value to society. So focus on your organizational culture and create a company that you can be proud of for generations.

Wondering how to do it? Read my post: Put Culture Change On Your 2017 CX Agenda. Here’s How. 

The bottom line: Organizational culture really, really matters!

Customer Experience Leads to Recommendations (Charts For 20 Industries)

If you want customers to recommend your company, make sure they have a good experience. In this post, I share data and analysis showing how customer experience correlates to customer recommendations across 20 industries. At the bottom of this post we’ve assembled a number of industry-specific data charts that you can download and use.

In the report, ROI of Customer Experience, 2016, we provide a lot of data on how customer experience affects a number of different aspects of loyalty for 20 industries. Here’s a summary of some of the data showing the average connection between customer experience and loyalty across all industries.

Here’s how we calculate this data:

• We ask 10,000 U.S. consumers to identify the companies that they’ve interacted with during the previous 90 days
• We have those consumers rate their experiences and segment the respondents into five buckets based on their Temkin Experience Ratings feedback
• For each of the five buckets of consumers, we calculate the average loyalty of the group across different dimensions using the calculations below…

(Note: See Temkin Loyalty Index for data on specific companies)

CX and Recommendations Charts for 20 Industries

If you’re looking for good data for your industry, we’ve put together these 20 industry charts that show the relationship between customer experience and customers making recommendations. Feel free to use them within your presentations in accordance with our citation policy.

Here’s a way to share the data internally…

At [Your Company’s Name], we work hard to improve our Customer Experience, and this industry chart from Temkin Group shows why it’s important and meaningful. As our Customer Experience improves, research shows that consumers are more likely to recommend us, which is one of the many ways in which our customers show their increased loyalty. 

Report: State of the CX Profession, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, State of the CX Profession, 2017. This is the fifth year that we’ve examined the roles of CX professionals and the third year that we’ve done a compensation study. Here’s the executive summary:

To understand the mindset and roles of customer experience professionals today, we surveyed 237 CX professionals and then compared their responses to similar studies we’ve conducted over the previous five years. We asked them how their CX efforts impacted their organization last year and about their plans for the coming year. This report also includes a compensation study, which is based on the 158 respondents who agreed to participate. Here are some highlights from the research:

• Eighty-four percent of respondents say that their customer experience efforts have had a positive business impact in 2016.
• Ninety-nine percent think that customer experience is a great profession to be in, the highest level we’ve seen in the six years we’ve been doing the study.
• Eighty percent think that customer experience will be more important for their companies in 2017 than it was in 2016, compared to the 3% who think it will be less important.
• Forty-nine percent expect to see an increase in their customer experience staffing levels this year – a higher percentage than we’ve seen in previous years.
• Respondents plan to increase their spending most on voice of the customer software and text analytics.
• Respondents plan to increase their focus most on Web experiences and customer insights and analysis.
• The total amount of compensation in our study ranges from $93,000 for mid-level individual contributors to $239,000 for CX executives.

Download report for $195

Here’s some data that combines pieces of two graphic, showing that CX continues to be a great profession….

Download report for $195

The bottom line: The CX profession is thriving.

Podcast: Purposeful Leadership With Tom Feeney, Safelite CEO

As part of Temkin Group’s celebration of 2017 as The Year of Purpose, I interviewed Tom Feeney, President & CEO of Safelite Group.

Temkin Group defines purposeful leadership as operating consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values. That also describes Tom. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Tom for many years, and believe that he is a great example of a purposeful leader.

While Safelite is by far the largest auto glass repair and replacement company in the U.S., the podcast does not focus on the company’s strong financial growth. Instead, Tom and I discuss Safelite’s purpose statement: Making a difference by bringing unexpected happiness to people’s everyday lives. Enjoy the podcast!

You can also download the podcast

Tom Feeney’s Bio:
Since joining Safelite Group in 1988, Tom Feeney has held several positions within the organization including senior vice president retail operations. In October 1991, Feeney was promoted to senior vice president, client sales and support and again in 2003 as executive vice president and chief client officer with responsibility for Safelite Solutions. Feeney became president and CEO of Safelite Group in 2008 and introduced a new vision for Safelite supported by two core principles: “People Powered, Customer Driven.”

Modernize Leadership: Observe and Improve

In a previous post, I described how today’s management techniques reflect outdated assumptions of technology-enabled practices, human behavior, and the meaning of success. That’s why organizations must shift to what I’m calling Modernize Leadership.

I’m writing individual posts for each of the eight key changes required to modernize leadership. In this post, I’m examining the shift from:

Measure and Track to Observe and Improve

Here’s some more information to better understand this shift:

Outdated Thinking
Here are some ways in which leaders must change how they view the world:

• You can’t manage what you can’t measure. That’s a refrain that I often hear, and it pushes people in the totally wrong direction. The reality is that most things in life are managed without explicit measurements. Think about a typical day. You get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and commute to work without referring to a dashboard of metrics. That does not mean that measurements can’t help, but they hardly ever tell the entire story.
• Managers often look for metrics they can to use to hold people and organizations accountable. Setting measurable goals is not a bad thing, but it can cause bad behaviors. Managers will sometimes overly focus on the metrics and ignore nuances such as actual behaviors of the team and shifts in the situation. They act as  if it’s possible to manage something you don’t truly understand. That all falls apart when the an organization needs to deviate from a “straight ahead” orientation.
• When employees believe that a metric is very important, they are explicitly and implicitly encouraged to do whatever it takes to achieve the goal. This can lead to inappropriate behaviors such as a car salesperson insisting that you give him a “10” on a survey. At Staples, a metric of $200 of add-ons for each computer pushed employees to refuse selling computers to customers who weren’t going to purchase add-ons.

Heres a quote that is often attributed to Albert Einstein:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Modernized Leadership Actions
Here are some ways in which leaders should act based on a modernized perspective:

• Look positively forward. Metrics often show how an organization has performed during some previous timeframe, but what you really care about is how it will get better in the future. Make sure that your discussions with people are focused on what the organization can learn in order to  improve, not on blaming people for the problems that caused a poor score.
• Encourage the right behaviors. If you want your organization to make improvements, then nurture the employee behaviors that will deliver better results. So celebrate employees who are doing the right things, even when the metrics aren’t great.
• Build operational empathy. If you want your employees to do the right things, then they should feel as if you know their environment. Rather than having employees just see you commenting on metrics from afar, set aside time to regularly get immersed in different parts of the organization. Ask employees how they think the company can improve. This will help you understand when to “back off” reacting too strongly to the metrics and let employees know that numbers aren’t everything.
• Enable continuous improvement. Instead of using measurements as a pure grading system, use them to identify places for improvement, and always ask: what have we learned and how can we get better? Your organization needs to have an ongoing improvement cycle that is at least at the same pace as your measurement system, otherwise metrics will only lead to frustration.

The bottom line: Observe your organization and focus on improvements.