A new study suggests that many leading UK companies, while offering customer experiences that are generally satisfying to their consumers, still fall behind those typically offered by their US contemporaries.
These results were recently detailed in Nunwood’s 2015 US Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) report, which took a comprehensive examination of 225 brands by soliciting responses from over 7,500 people. Unlike many past surveys, the CEE report was not simply based on consumer perceptions or abstract feelings attributed to a particular brand. Rather, it focused on real customer feedback and actual product reviews.
“Whilst there are many examples of great UK brands, excellent customer experiences occur more frequently and more consistently in in the USA,” said Tim Knight, a Senior Partner at Nunwood. “The way American CEOs run their businesses, their digital investments and business models provide rich sources of learning for UK brands with similar ambitions.”
Nunwood, an international voice of the customer analytics firm that specializes in customer experience management solutions, compared UK and US brands in six key categories including personalization, integrity, effort, expectations, resolution, and empathy. These categories were then combined with customer loyalty and advocacy scores to generate a complete customer experience score.
In addition to ranking the top 100 US brands, the CEE found that US and UK brands diverged from one another on a number of levels. Overall, the report found that the customer engagement score of US companies were, on average, 5% better than comparable UK companies. It also calculated that UK brands are trailing the progress of similar US brands by about five years.
These differences can ultimately add up to significant differences in revenue and customer loyalty. US companies that were ranked as “outstanding” were 10 times more likely to see repeat business from consumers. This was in contrast to UK companies that received very similar rankings. Finally, the CEE also reported that US CEO’s are more engaged with their customers, which means that they are more likely to institute polices, procedures, and make business decisions that consider customer experiences on a deeper level.
Nunwood considers the CEE report to be a “celebration of excellence” that showcases the brands committed to reaching new levels of quality. This year the 2015 reports found the overall leading company to be USAA, a top financial services firm in the United States.
“USAA service representatives know and respect the noble mission of our membership and this is why they go above and beyond to assist them,” said Tom Grothues, SVP Financial Foundations. “We strive to understand and anticipate the needs of our members and continually develop innovative solutions to help meet them.”
Other top US brands included Publix, Amazon, Chick-fil-A, and Disney. The top UK brand was First Direct. A comprehensive list of findings included in Nunwood’s 2015 US Customer Experience Excellence can be found online at www.nunwood.com.