Retailers take four of the top spots — including No. 1 — in annual CX ranking

Retailers made a good showing in an annual ranking of the brands delivering the best customer experience.  

Four of the top 11 brands on the full index of Forrester’s US 2021 Customer Experience Index this year are retailers — more than any other single surveyed industry. Honors went to Chewy.com (No. 1 overall), Etsy (No. 3 overall), Trader Joe’s (No. 4 overall), and Costco (No. 11 overall). (Looking only at the other 39 retail brands in the study, next on the list are H-E-B, Publix, and Wegman’s.)

“The common thread among these top retail performers is those things we needed most during the pandemic,” Fiona Swerdlow, VP research director, Forrester, wrote in a blog on the company’s site. “Pets (and their supplies), groceries, masks, and home goods defined a lot of life in lockdown, and U.S. consumers felt that these retail brands stood by them during a difficult year.”

Additionally, the highest-scoring brands understood the key emotional needs of their customers and provided emotionally pleasing experiences, according to Forrester. They also developed a core group of loyal customers or devotees: those willing to forgive these brands’ mistakes, pay a premium for the brands’ products, keep their business with the brands, and spend more with the brands over time.

Here is Swerdlow’s take on what the top-performing retail brands did to deliver customer experience quality via effectiveness, ease, and emotion:

• Chewy.com in 2020 stepped up to surging pet adoption and caretaking by (often newly) homebound US consumers. Chewy.com customers grew 42.7% year over year. As “pet parents,” fully 28% of Chewy.com customers are “devotees” — that is, those customers are willing to forgive these brands’ mistakes, pay a premium for the brands’ products, keep their business with the brands, and spend more over time. 

To meet this growth, the company invested in automation and fulfillment capabilities, introduced services such as “Connect With a Vet” telehealth and compounded pet meds, launched online gift cards, and transitioned customer support teams to work from home to continue providing service.

• Etsy is a perennial consumer favorite. Twenty percent of its customers in 2021 are devotees — slightly lower than the retail industry average (23%). However, its investments for better customer and seller experiences paid off. Capitalizing on its unique merchandise assortment, the company introduced customer experience-enhancing features such as installment payments and search filtering around expected delivery dates. All told, in 2020, consolidated gross merchandise sales were up 106% year-over-year — including over $740 million in face masks alone.

• Trader Joe’s continues to delight customers with high quality, well-priced private-label goods, and ready assistance from cheery Hawaiian shirt-clad “crew members.”

• Costco members continue to rely on the retailer across categories such as food, housewares, pharmacy, over-the-counter medication, small electronics, and consumer electronics. And in 2020, the company invested in e-commerce and logistics to meet overall growth.

Conducted for the seventh year in a row, Forrester’s CX Index results are benchmarked on a survey of more than 85,000 U.S. customers across 220 brands and 13 industries.
 

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