VIDEO: One Channel Dominates Customer Experience & It’s Not Convenience

NATIONAL REPORT — Supermarket chains took 13 out of the top 20 spots in the sixth-annual Temkin Experience Ratings, with regional grocers Publix and H-E-B earning the highest overall scores. 

Other supermarket chains in the top 20 were Save-a-Lot, Kroger, Wegmans, Aldi, Food Lion, ShopRite, Giant Eagle, Trader Joe’s, Winn-Dixie and Hy-Vee.

Convenience store operator Wawa Inc. earned a spot in the top 20, but was also classified as a supermarket by Temkin.

The ratings were based on three factors:

1. Success: How do experiences meet the needs of customers?
2. Effort: Does the business make it easy for customers to do what they want to do?
3. Emotion: How do customers feel about shopping in a retailer's store or website?

To generate the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings, the firm asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate their recent interactions with 294 companies across 20 industries and then evaluated those experiences across the three dimensions of success, effort and emotion.

The 20 industries included: airlines, auto dealers, banks, computer and tablet makers, credit card issuers, fast-food chains, health plans, hotel chains, insurance carriers, Internet service providers, investment firms, major appliance makers, parcel delivery services, rental car agencies, retailers, software firms, supermarket chains, TV service providers, utilities, and wireless carriers.

Average scores for all 20 industries in the 2016 ratings declined year over year. The percentage of good and excellent companies dropped from 37 percent in 2015 to 18 percent in 2016.

Health plans had some of the lowest scores of the 294 companies surveyed.

The full 2016 ratings can be downloaded for free from the Customer Experience Matters blog at ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com, or the Temkin Group website at TemkinGroup.com.

Temkin Group is a leading customer experience research and consulting firm.