Data: M&S to Monzo – the top 50 brands bossing customer experience

Shoppers across the globe now have less to spend, they feel more vulnerable, their values have evolved and they are becoming increasingly digitally savvy. 

In this ‘new world’, the customer experience and a brand’s ability to build lasting relationships with consumers have become more crucial than ever.

As experts at the KPMG Nunwood Excellence Centre put it: “We are entering an ‘integrity economy’, one where the ethics of an organisation are as important as its products and services.”

So which brands are best placed to win in that market? 

According to research from KPMG’s international think tank, 23 of the top 50 brands in its Customer Experience Excellence ranking for 2020 are retailers. 

TV shopping channel QVC led the way, finishing second in the ranking behind internet bank First Direct, which retained the top spot.

John Lewis & Partners rose up the list to fourth, one place ahead of Lush, while Lakeland and Marks & Spencer also made the top 10. 

Lessons from the customer experience champions

The KPMG Nunwood Excellence Centre suggests there are now six key pillars to driving the customer experience: integrity; resolution and innovation; expectations; time and effort; personalisation; and empathy.

Integrity

“Trust is an outcome of consistent organisational behaviour that demonstrates trustworthiness,” KPMG says. “There are trust-building events where organisations have the need to publicly react to a difficult situation. And trust-building moments where individual actions by staff add up to create trust in the organisation as a whole. 

“Behavioural economics teaches us that we trust people we like. The ability to build rapport is therefore critical in creating trust.”

KPMG hails Waitrose’s creation of a £1m community support fund, Deliveroo’s donations of 500,000 meals to NHS staff and Aviva giving £15m to the Red Cross and NHS charities as examples of brands that have shown integrity during the coronavirus crisis. 

Resolution and innovation

Turning a poor experience into a great one is crucial if brands are to retain customers for the longer term. 

As KPMG’s report puts it: “Customer recovery is highly important. Even with the best processes and procedures, things will go wrong. 

“Great companies have a process that not only puts the customer back in the position they should have been in as rapidly as possible, but also makes the customer feel really good about the experience.”

A host of banks and building societies acted quickly to preempt this, scrapping overdraft fees and introducing payment holidays on loans and mortgages to help customers in financial difficulty. 

Expectations

Even during a global pandemic, customers have expectations around how their demands will be fulfilled. As KPMG points out: “Customer satisfaction is the difference between expectation and actual delivery. Understanding, delivering and, if possible, exceeding expectations is a key skill of great organisations.” 

KPMG points to Tesco as a prime example of a business that achieved this during the pandemic, praising the way it “reacted quickly to changing customer demand, putting the needs of the many first and restricting the products manufactured by its suppliers to the essentials”. 

It adds that weekly customer email updates from chief executive Dave Lewis kept shoppers informed of changes being made for customers, staff and communities, proactively managing consumer expectations at the height of the crisis. 

Time and effort

The modern shopper is increasingly time-poor and wants “instant gratification,” KPMG says. 

As a result, “removing unnecessary obstacles, impediments and bureaucracy to enable the customer to achieve their objectives quickly and easily have been shown to increase loyalty”.

The likes of Amazon continue to use time as a source of competitive advantage, growing their sales during the pandemic by rationalising ranges so that it could maintain rapid delivery times. 

Personalisation

Retailers and brands have long grappled with the art of personalisation and attempting to master it in order to give their shoppers genuinely unique and tailored shopping experiences.

During the coronavirus crisis, shoppers wanted to feel as though their specific needs and circumstances were being understood and accounted for. Companies’ abilities to address customers directly by name and access knowledge of preferences and past interactions are all key to creating an experience that feels personal and starts to build an emotional connection.

Supermarkets leaned into this, offering dedicated opening hours for older and vulnerable customers and NHS staff, while KPMG also hails Starbucks for the way it extended its mental health benefits to workers’ family members, offering them personalised, confidential mental health care during the pandemic.

Empathy

Arguably the most important pillar during the pandemic, this metric measures how a brand drives a rapport with its customers based on an understanding of their personal needs and circumstances.

According to KPMG: “Empathy-creating behaviours are key to establishing a strong relationship and involve the telling of personal stories that reflect back to the customer how you felt when in similar circumstances. Then going the extra step because you understand how they feel.”

For example, Sainsbury’s prioritised older and vulnerable shoppers for online food deliveries, FirstVet offered free video appointments to people who were self-isolating with pets and Admiral Insurance gave its customers a £25 ‘stay at home’ refund because fewer drivers were on the road.

First Direct, Leon and its peers in the top 50 offer examples of how retailers and brands can ramp up their customer experience credentials in a post-coronavirus world. 

But others still need to adapt. As KPMG concludes: “The ‘new customer’ has the potential to disrupt every enterprise. How well businesses compete in this changed environment will determine future viability and growth.”