Featured Image for the blog: How 3 Companies Top The Charts In Customer Service

Customer service is the most important aspect of a company’s overall success. Regardless of how your company functions, whether it’s brick and mortar or e-commerce, whether you sell a product or a service, the impression your team of agents makes on your customers is very clearly related to your company’s success and revenue. The top companies in customer service all have the revenue and continued growth to back the importance of building a customer-centric culture.

When a company excels at providing quality customer service, the impact reaches beyond just your customers. Your employees feel the upbeat effect of serving up that quality service, and a cycle of positivity begins. That consistently good customer service translates into a phenomenal customer experience at every point in your customers’ journey. Companies with the best customer service (and then, customer experience) have dozens of common factors that influence their success. But one that’s incredibly important and has a substantial impact, is high employee satisfaction.

The Temkin Group recently released their Customer Experience Ratings. They determine the ratings with a consumer survey that takes a pulse on customers’ experience with more than 300 companies. Customers rate their recent interactions with the companies, and Temkin bundles all those ratings into one summed-up experience score.

For this year’s survey, customers had to rate their experience with the different companies in three categories: functional, accessible, and emotional.

We dissected the survey results and found an intriguing connection between the three companies who topped the charts. The top companies in customer service all boast a company make-up of highly satisfied employees.

Check out what we discovered about the big three.

Publix

Publix ranked number one in customer experience satisfaction with a Temkin Experience Rating of 84 percent. They are a Florida-based supermarket with over 10,000 employees, generating more than 10 billion in year-over-year revenue. As the nation’s largest employee-owned company, Publix’s mission statement centers not only around customer satisfaction but employee well-being and happiness, too.

“Our mission at Publix is to be the premier quality food retailer in the world. To that end, we commit to being passionately focused on customer value, intolerant of waste, dedicated to the dignity, value and employment security of our associates, devoted to the highest standards of stewardship for our stockholders, involved as responsible citizens in our communities.”

On Glassdoor.com employees give Publix an overall rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars in the employee satisfaction category. Publix CEO, Todd Jones, has a 74 percent approval rating among his employees.

Many employees named the company as the “best place they’ve ever worked,” often citing their great benefits and positive view of the leadership team. In fact, employees state the key term “great benefits” in 491 reviews.

Chick-Fil-A

Chick-Fil-A is a company known for having the best customer service. They consistently respond to customers’ “thank you” with the phrase “my pleasure,” regardless of how many times a customer utters a thank you. Give it a whirl and try it out. Employees return every “thank you” you speak with a “my pleasure” sentiment. Maybe it’s the southern charm picked up from their company headquarters in Atlanta, or maybe it’s just the stellar experience they coach employees to provide. They tied for rank number two on Temkin’s list, with a total score of 83 percent.

Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-Fil-A, was 2017’s highest-rated CEO with an overall approval rating of 93 percent, according to Glassdoor.com.

Chick-Fil-A’s employees are just as pleased with the company as its customers are. One employee from Columbia, S.C. reviewed their employee experience saying, “The values and standards are high, most of the employees and management are friendly, and it gives you everything you need to proceed to better jobs in the future. You will learn great customer service, a mandatory skill, as well as how to work under pressure while simultaneously making new friends, and maybe meeting old ones.”

H-E-B

H-E-B is a privately-owned grocery store with more than $21 billion in revenue. They have 80,000+ employees who the company affectionately calls their “partners.”

H-E-B tied with Chick-Fil-A for second highest in customer experience satisfaction, also raking in a score of 83 percent on the Temkin Group Customer Experience Rating.

H-E-B employees are so pleased with the company that 86 percent of them would recommend it as a place to work, according to Glassdoor. One employee worked for H-E-B for over three years and took to the review site to give their recommendation:

“So many pros to this company!! Great pay, managers were great to employees, some unexpected bonuses, great environment, and benefits!”

Glassdoor is flooded with glowing employee reviews and recommendations based on their positive experience with the company.

It’s true. Happy employees make happy customers.

These companies offer real-world proof that there’s a correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

Here are a few ways the top companies work to provide the best employee experience.

  1. Two of the three companies give their employees some piece of ownership in the company, whether they give employees company stock or make employees partners with equal stakes.
  2. All three companies have CEOs with high ratings. That means the leadership team has built an environment filled with trust and transparency surrounding their decisions.
  3. And finally, employees from all three companies feel well-supported and properly trained.

Improve your customer satisfaction by way of employee satisfaction.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your CSAT, follow the examples these companies share. Start by taking inventory of areas where you can improve your employees’ satisfaction. Listen to, invest in, and implement strategies to better communicate with your employees and meet their needs.

The secret to these companies’ success isn’t a secret at all. Because they have employees who feel respected, those employees treat customers with that same level of respect. The employees’ love for the company comes across in everything they do at work. And it’s that love that keeps employees loyal and customers happy.

We originally published this post on Oct. 17, 2017. We updated it on Nov. 19, 2018.