Consumers give high marks to supermarkets in survey

WABAN, Mass. — Supermarkets led the way in delivering the best customer experience in the retail industry, according to the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings.

Temkin Group’s annual customer experience ranking, released Monday, asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate their recent interactions with 331 companies across 20 industries. Their experiences were evaluated in three areas: success (can you do what you want to do?), effort (how easy is it to work with the company?) and emotion (how do you feel about the interactions?). Temkin then averaged these three scores to produce each company’s Temkin Experience Rating.

Among supermarkets and other retailers, Publix had the top rating at 84%. Rounding out the top scores among food, drug and mass retail chains were H-E-B (83%), Hannaford (82%), BJ’s Wholesale Club (81%), Food Lion (81%), Trader Joe’s (81%), Sam’s Club (80%), Winn-Dixie (80%), Save-A-Lot (80%), Wegmans (80%) and Kroger (80%).

A rating of 80% or above is considered “excellent,” a score of 70% or above is deemed “good” and a score below 60% is considered “poor,” according to Temkin.

Walgreens had the highest score (75%) in customer experience among drug chains, followed by Rite Aid (73%) and CVS (72%).

After BJ’s and Sam’s, Costco Wholesale Club had the next highest rating among mass merchants at 73%, compared with Target at 72%, Walmart at 71% and Kmart at 66%.

Online retail giant Amazon had a 78% score in customer experience, also matched by supermarket chains Aldi, Giant Eagle, Hy-Vee and Whole Foods.

Dollar store chains also tallied strong scores, led by Dollar Tree at 78%. Dollar General and Family Dollar both had a 74% rating.

Supermarkets had the top customer experience rating among industries in 2017 at 78%, with other retailers coming in at No. 3 with an aggregate score of 74%, Temkin said.

Other industries evaluated for the ranking included fast food, parcel delivery, banks, streaming media, hotels, credit cards, car dealers, insurance, utilities, TV and appliances, investments, computers and tablets, airlines, wireless, software, rental cars and transport, health plans and TV/Internet service.