The world's top companies for best-in-class customer experience
Best Brands for Customer Experience
When it comes to emotions, value, and service, how well does your company stack up?
7 Minute Read
Demo the technology behind this reportWe analyzed 17 million real customer conversations to find out which brands offer best-in-class customer experience.
Introduction
Across your business you likely have several teams using dozens of different metrics to determine whether your company’s successful. However, marketing executives are beginning to realize that customer experience matters more than any other metric they report on.
What makes customer experience (CX) so important? CX represents all of your customers’ feelings about your company. And, ultimately, every activity your marketing team does, every product release, every store opening, and every investment you make is done to improve those feelings.
Since social media is the largest database of customer opinions, it’s the perfect data source for understanding CX.
For the second year running, we analyzed opinions around CX and compared brands based on three facets of the customer journey:
- The emotions a brand elicits, and whether the brand makes people feel good
- The value of the company, or whether people indicate purchase intent online
- The service of the company, and whether current customers can get the help they need.
From before they buy your products to when they have service questions, customers share their opinions online. By analyzing 17 million online conversations, we found which companies are serving up the best experiences.
Where to get the best experience
According to social media, if you’re looking for the overall best customer experience, look no further than these brands.
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New to the top 10 Sephora
Sephora is one of the most popular beauty, make-up, and personal care retailers out there.
Not only does their audience appreciate the product lines they deliver, but also their dedication to providing quality customer service both in-store and online (responding to most messages after ~2 hours). These factors made this brands one of the most positively discussed and most desirable retailers we analyzed.
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Recent additions Chili's and Olive Garden (tied)
Tied for second, new additions Chili’s and Olive Garden sneak into the top three best brands for CX.
Chili’s success came from a distributed approach to CX, coming in slightly above average in every category we measured.
On the other hand, one of the major reasons Olive Garden rose to the top was their dedication to responding to customer comments online, as the 15th most responsive brand of the hundreds we looked at.
Olive Garden used social media to address both positive and negative customer comments, thanking customers for their compliments and trying to remedy patron issues or negative reviews. This level of responsiveness (24% of all @mentions during the time period we analyzed) is unusual for any industry, but remarkable for the restaurant industry, where the average response rate is closer to 5%.
1
Returning champion T-Mobile
For the second year in a row, T-Mobile tops the charts as the best brand for customer experience.
Many of T-Mobile’s online commentary reference their product offerings, their pricing compared to their competitors, and the joy their customers feel saving money on #TMobileTuesdays.
However, overwhelmingly, most of the reason people rave about this telecom company online can be traced to their exceptional customer service.
93% of senior executives said improving CX is one of their company’s top three priorities in the next two years.
The overall best brands
Using Brandwatch Analytics, we were able to compare hundreds of the biggest, global brands based on emotions, value, and service.
Here are the top 100 brands that did the best in all three categories.
The top 100 brands for the best CX
Ranking | Brand |
---|---|
1 | T-Mobile |
2 | Chili's |
3 | Olive Garden |
4 | Sephora |
5 | Whataburger |
6 | Stella Artois |
7 | Stradivarius |
8 | Delta Air Lines |
9 | Dove |
10 | Southwest Airlines |
11 | Apple |
12 | Mercedes-Benz |
13 | EE |
14 | Sony |
15 | Budweiser |
16 | BMW |
17 | Iberia Airlines |
18 | Saudi Arabian Airlines |
19 | Subway |
20 | Bershka |
21 | Dell |
22 | GoPro |
23 | Sky |
24 | Wendy's |
25 | Target |
26 | Lenovo |
27 | Huggies |
28 | Cartier |
29 | Pantene |
30 | Chick-fil-A |
31 | Virgin Media |
32 | Sierra Nevada |
33 | Papa Johns |
34 | Jeep |
35 | Samsung Electronics |
36 | GameStop |
37 | Cadillac |
38 | JetBlue |
39 | Pizza Hut |
40 | Barclays |
41 | Comcast |
42 | Dominos |
43 | O2 |
44 | United Airlines |
45 | American Express |
46 | Nintendo |
47 | MTV |
48 | Amazon |
49 | Burger King |
50 | Clean & Clear |
51 | Telstra |
52 | American Airlines |
53 | Globe Telecoms |
54 | Rogers |
55 | Motorola |
56 | Verizon Wireless |
57 | Sprint |
58 | Vodafone |
59 | Repsol |
60 | CocaCola |
61 | Urban Outfitters |
62 | Fox |
63 | Interjet |
64 | McDonalds |
65 | Duke Energy |
66 | TD Bank |
67 | SKYY |
68 | Jack Daniel's |
69 | KLM |
70 | Avianca |
71 | Oysho |
72 | Smart |
73 | Taco Bell |
74 | ASOS |
75 | Nandos |
76 | Tesla |
77 | Audi |
78 | Best Buy |
79 | Coors |
80 | AT&T |
81 | Porsche |
82 | Nickelodeon |
83 | Yves Saint Laurent |
84 | Zappos |
85 | Adidas |
86 | Netflix |
87 | Buffalo Wild Wings |
88 | Vanguard |
89 | DirecTV |
90 | Food Network |
91 | Toyota |
92 | Pepsi |
93 | Nike |
94 | Patron |
95 | IBM |
96 | Dish Network |
97 | Sunoco |
98 | Jim Beam |
99 | Mango |
100 | Saudi Aramco |
Biggest changes from last year
- Our addition of the restaurant sector brought three restaurants to the top of our list: Olive Garden, Chili’s, and Whataburger. It seemed as if food joints, and these brands specifically, particularly shined in terms of the positivity of the conversation and customers indicating purchase intent for them.
- A few brands like American Express, Southwest Airlines, and Lenovo dropped a bit from their top rankings last year, while still maintaining top 50 status.
- And compared to 2018, it seems as if companies are taking social media as a customer care medium more seriously overall. While response rates for all brands didn’t see a significant increase year over year, the average time brands took to respond dropped from almost 18 hours to about 11.5.
Emotions: The most pleasing brands
Well before anyone considers buying your products, they’ve likely already experienced two things:
- They’ve seen advertising or other brand messages before.
- They have people in their network—friends, colleagues, family—who have opinions about your company.
Before they even think about using your brand, their customer experience journey has started and perceptions of your brand have been formed.
So, learning the emotions your brand elicits and listening to how people talk about your brand is one of the first indications of a healthy CX.
Is your product pleasant to use? Did people like your latest commercial? What are the associations customers make with your brand, and are they positive?
All of these emotions play a role in your bottom line.
We deciphered these emotional conversations and found the most pleasing companies out there.
The following table shows the 15 brands that customers talk most positively about.
15 Most Pleasing Brands
Ranking | Brands | Most Pleasing Brands |
---|---|---|
1 | Galeria Kaufhof | 97.93% |
2 | Pixar | 97.53% |
3 | GameStop | 95.86% |
4 | MTV | 95.48% |
5 | Bentley | 95.44% |
6 | Moët & Chandon | 95.17% |
7 | Hewlett-Packard | 95.16% |
8 | Intel | 95.09% |
9 | Pantene | 95.00% |
10 | Yves Saint Laurent | 94.97% |
11 | Stradivarius | 94.72% |
12 | Maserati | 94.72% |
13 | Calvin Klein | 94.63% |
14 | Sierra Nevada | 94.61% |
15 | Grey Goose | 94.26% |
Most positive industries
To provide more context, we were interested to see if we could identify any trends based on industry.
We collapsed all the brands we monitored into 12 industries to find which industries generally garner the most positive conversation.
Compared to last year’s report, most industries found their conversation get more positive this time around. Alcohol and financial services companies in particular saw an improvement in their conversations.
Unlike the alcohol industry which saw incremental improvements across several brands, in financial brands this was primarily driven by more positive conversations about Mastercard and Prudential specifically.
[Brandwatch] allows us to stay as close to customer sentiment in real-time as we possibly can.
Value: The most wanted brands
Positive conversations about your brand can give you a good sense of your brand’s health.
However, measuring how many people explicitly say they want to purchase your products or services can be directly related to sales. These mentions are an important measure of whether your company is valuable to your customers.
“Intent-to-purchase” conversations—social media posts where people say they want, need, or will buy a product—express a desire for a product, and count people further in the customer journey.
Here are the top brands people were dying to buy.
15 Most Wanted Brands
Ranking | Brands | Volume of Purchase-Intent Conversations |
---|---|---|
1 | Chick-fil-A | 561 |
2 | Wendy's | 524 |
3 | Tesla | 508 |
4 | McDonald's | 499 |
5 | T-Mobile | 487 |
6 | Taco Bell | 423 |
7 | Nintendo | 411 |
8 | Apple | 364 |
9 | Nike | 271 |
10 | Microsoft | 260 |
11 | O2 | 256 |
12 | Verizon Wireless | 252 |
13 | AT&T | 248 |
14 | Whataburger | 213 |
15 | Dunkin Donuts | 189 |
Brand comparisons
We compared a few well-known competitors based on how many people wanted to buy them.
Brand | Volume of purchase intent conversation |
---|---|
Chick-fil-A | 561 |
Wendy's | 524 |
Brand | Volume of purchase intent conversation |
---|---|
Dominos | 188 |
Pizza Hut | 95 |
Brand | Volume of purchase intent conversation |
---|---|
Nike | 271 |
Reebok | 18 |
Brand | Volume of purchase intent conversation |
---|---|
Amazon | 66 |
Ebay | 4 |
The digital customer experience is becoming as important a differentiator for brands as product and price.
Service: The most responsive brands
Once you’ve got your customer base, how successful are you at responding to their questions, concerns, and needs?
In this section, we look at customer service—a vital part of customer experience—and identify the brands and industries most invested in responding to their customers.
Most responsive brands
For the second year in a row, what became clear once we looked at responsiveness of brands is that few companies respond to more than 10% of the direct @mentions they receive online. In fact, the average response rate for all the brands was just 4.84%.
This makes the companies that do reply that much better, standing out from the pack.
These are the brands that responded to the most of their customers’ messages:
15 Most Responsive Brands
Ranking | Brand | Response Rate |
---|---|---|
1 | ClaroBrasil | 91.0% |
2 | Virgin Media | 73.7% |
3 | EE | 55.5% |
4 | Telstra | 48.2% |
5 | Sky | 40.9% |
6 | Apple | 35.2% |
7 | O2 | 32.7% |
8 | Zappos | 29.8% |
9 | Delta Air Lines | 28.0% |
10 | United Airlines | 27.2% |
11 | KLM | 26.8% |
12 | Southwest Airlines | 25.9% |
13 | Azul Linhas Aereas | 25.4% |
14 | Vodafone | 24.9% |
15 | Olive Garden | 24.6% |
Quickest brands to respond
According to one survey, 32% of people who contact a brand on social media expect a response within 30 minutes. A further 10% expect a response within 60 minutes.
It doesn’t just matter that you respond; you’ve got to respond quickly.
We wanted to know which brands truly take that to heart.
15 Quickest Brands to Respond
15 | Brands | Average response time in minutes |
---|---|---|
1 | Best Buy | 0.53 |
2 | Fox | 0.55 |
3 | Discovery | 1.15 |
4 | Nintendo | 1.43 |
5 | History | 3.70 |
6 | Spectrum | 8.53 |
7 | Sony | 9.30 |
8 | Saudi Aramco | 9.87 |
9 | Dish Network | 10.93 |
10 | TMobile | 12.17 |
11 | United Airlines | 12.99 |
12 | Barclays | 14.93 |
13 | Southwest Airlines | 17.09 |
14 | JetBlue | 17.49 |
15 | Delta Air Lines | 18.03 |
Most responsive industries
Similar to last year, we’re not surprised to see telecommunication and airlines companies over-represented in these responsiveness measurements. To put this in a greater context, we sought to see how these industries compared as a whole in investment in social customer care.
Below we identified how quickly 12 sectors responded to their customers, and what percent of their @mentions get replies.
Response Rates by Industry
Response Times by Industry
Understanding how conversation changes and having the ability to react in a timely manner for our clients allows us to give them the information that matters, when it matters.
Summary
Using Brandwatch Analytics, we collected millions of customer opinions and found the brands committed to best-in-breed experience.
From the emotions your brand creates, to the quality of service you provide, social listening is the perfect tool to make sure you’re always at the top of your customer experience.
Methodology
This report analyzed 240 brands in total, 20 brands in 12 sectors. The brands were selected through two processes. First, we examined revenue and output lists, industry literature, and social data to compile a list of the biggest brands on social. Then, to determine which brands were the most active on social media, we identified the 20 brands in 12 sectors with the highest social following.
To rank the overall best brands for CX, we ranked all 240 brands by emotions, value and service, then averaged their rankings for each metric (For instance, if brand X was #1 in emotions, #3 in value, and #5 in service, its average ranking would be 3). We then sorted all 240 brands by their average ranking from lowest to highest to find which brands were higher across our metrics overall.
Emotions: measuring pleasing conversations
Pleasing conversations were identified using Brandwatch’s automatic sentiment analysis, which uses machine-learning techniques to automatically categorize the sentiment of dozens of languages. Unlike last year, we chose to only use our sentiment classifier instead of including our emoji or emotion analysis techniques. We believed that our sentiment analysis gave a more valuable assessment for a brand’s CX than emotions does. For instance, while a message like “oh man the ending to @hbo’s new series has me in tears 😭” would be categorized as ‘sad’, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that HBO has bad CX because the brand made this user sad.
Value: measuring the most wanted brands
To measure the volume of conversations around customers wanting brands, we created “intent” rules to automatically tag any brand mentions with purchase intent. All of these rules search for mentions with a personal pronoun (I, “I’d”, we, etc.) in front of an expansive list of action phrases or terms related to the specific industry. For instance, for the retail industry, action phrases would look like “want to go to” or “gotta hit up” or “trying to go to”; for the consumer technology companies, these terms would look like “want to buy” or “gotta have” or “plan to order”. For more information on purchase intent rules, see our handy how-to article.
Service: measuring responsiveness
Response rates and times were determined by dividing the number of brand replies by the number of audience @mentions over a given time frame, then evaluating the time difference between the @mention and reply.