H-E-B and Trader Joe’s Earn Highest Emotion Ratings

In a previous post, I defined the three elements of an experience: Success, Effort, and Emotion.

Emotion is a significant blind spot for most organizations. In the Temkin Group report State of CX Metrics, 2013, we found that only 11% of large companies feel that they do a very good job of measuring customers’ emotional responses. Our ROI of Customer Experience, 2014 shows that emotion is the most significant driver of loyalty, especially when it comes to consumers recommending firms to their friends.

We’ve been measuring emotion as part of our Temkin Experience Ratings for four years. Our emotion rating is based on asking consumers the following question:

Thinking of your most recent interactions with each of these companies, how did you feel about those interactions?

Responses range from 1 (upset) to 7 (delighted) and the emotion rating is calculated as the percentage of consumers who select 6 or 7 minus the percentage who select 1, 2, or 3.

As you can see in the list of leaders and laggards below (from ratings of 268 companies across 19 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers), H-E-B earned the highest overall emotion rating of 84%, outpacing second place Trader Joe’s by three points.

At the other end of the spectrum, Empire BCBS earned the l0west rating of 31% and several companies were just slightly better with 32%: Comcast (Internet and TV service), Charter Communications, and US Cellular.

The bottom line: Stop ignoring how your customers feel.

H-E-B Earns Highest Effort Rating, Medicaid Earns Lowest

In a previous post, I defined the three elements of an experience: Success, Effort, and Emotion. We’ve been measuring each of these areas as part of our Temkin Experience Ratings for four years. So I decided to share some insights from the effort ratings component of those overall ratings (you can see this data as part of the Temkin Experience Ratings datasets).

As you can see in the charts below (from ratings of 268 companies across 19 industries based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers):

• H-E-B, Food Lion, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Publix, credit unions, Sonic Drive-In, Trader Joe’s, Dairy Queen, Kroger, Little Caesar’s, Starbucks, Piggly Wiggly, and Regions have the highest effort ratings.
• Medicaid, Empire (BCBS), Coventry Health Care, Highmark (BCBS), Motel 6, Super 8, Residence Inn, Hitachi, Haier, Comcast, US Airways, and Chrysler have the lowest effort ratings.
• Grocery chains and fast food chains have the highest average effort ratings while health plans, TV service providers, Internet service providers, and hotels have the lowest.
• Led by a five point improvement in credit cards, 13 out of the 19 industries improved between 2013 and 2014.
• Hotels dropped eight points from 2013 to 2014, by far the largest of the three industries that declined. the others: parcel delivery services and retailers.

Report: What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2014

We just published a Temkin Group report, What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2014. The report, which includes 19 data charts, examines which companies and industries provide the most bad experiences, what impact those experiences have on spending, and how the negative impacts of bad experiences can be mitigated by good service recovery. The report also examines how consumers share their good and bad experiences with companies as well as with other people. Here’s the executive summary:

To understand the effect of good and bad experiences, we asked 10,000 U.S. consumers about their recent interactions with 268 companies across 19 industries. Results show that Internet services and TV services are the industries most likely to deliver a bad experience to their customers, while grocery chains are the least likely to. At the company level, Scottrade had the smallest percentage of customers reporting a recent bad experience with the company and Time Warner Cable had the highest. More than half of the customers who encountered a bad experience at a fast food chain, credit card issuer, grocery store, or hotel either decreased their spending with the company or stopped altogether. However, our data shows that a good service recovery effort can help mitigate a bad experience. Unfortunately, many firms—especially in the banking, Internet services, and TV services sectors—aren’t very good at service recovery. In addition to the consequences of bad interactions, we also examined which channels customers use to share their good and bad experiences and how these changed across age groups. We then compared these results to survey responses from the past two years. We also uncovered a negative bias inherent in how customers provide feedback. ING Direct, Residence Inn, and Fairfield Inn have the most negative bias in the feedback they receive directly from customers, while Hy-Vee and Hyundai have the most negative bias on Facebook. 

Click link to see full list of industries and companies covered in this report (.pdf).

Download report for $195

One of the most interesting analyses in the report is the look at how service recovery after a bad experience affects the spending pattern of consumers. Here’s a summary of one of the charts showing just how important it is for a company to recover well after making a mistake:

Here are some other insights from the research:

• Sixteen percent of consumers who have interacted with TV service and Internet service providers report having a bad experience over the previous six months. Next on the list are wireless carriers, with 12% of their customers reporting a bad experience. At the other end of the spectrum, only 3% of consumers report a bad experience with grocery chains and 4% report having a bad experience with fast food chains.
• The five companies with the most customers reporting bad experiences are Time Warner Cable (25%), Motel 6 (22%), Coventry Health Care (21%), and Comcast (21%). There were 10 companies with only 1% or less of their customers reporting bad experiences: Scottrade, Chick-fil-A, H.E.B., Whole Foods, ShopRite, ING Direct, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Vanguard, and True Value.
• More than one-quarter of consumers who have a bad experience stop spending with computer makers, car rental agencies, credit card issuers, hotel chains, and software companies. The impact of bad experiences is less costly for parcel delivery services, wireless carriers, health plans, TV service providers, Internet service providers, and grocery chains, as less than 15% of their customers with bad experience stopped spending.
• The industries that are the best at responding to a bad experience are investment firms, major appliances, retailers, and car rental agencies. The industries that are the worst at responding to a bad experience are TV service providers, wireless carriers, Internet service providers, parcel delivery services, and health plans.
• Thirty-two percent of consumers give feedback directly to companies after a very bad experience and 23% give feedback after a very good experience.
• Overall, 25- to 34-year-olds are the most likely to share feedback about their experiences. After a good experience 57% tell a friend directly, 28% share on Facebook, and 18% put a comment or rating on a review site. After a bad experience, 60% tell a friend directly, 31% share on Facebook, and 20% write a review.

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Make sure to recover quickly after a bad experience