John Lewis does it again for Customer Satisfaction

About a week or so ago now Verdict Research published their latest report on customer satisfaction and guess what John Lewis came out on top again for the third year running.  So Britain’s best loved department store is also Britain’s best loved store in general beating off competition to secure the prize.

The top five were -

1. John Lewis
2. Amazon
3. Play
4. Dunelm Mill
5. Marks and Spencer

John Lewis has also just posted better than average sales so it goes to show that if you put customer satisfaction at the heart of what you do you will reap the benefits.

Interestingly 2 of the top five, Amazon and Play are online retailers but they are still performing very well on customer satisfaction.  We have talked before on this blog about the importance of customer service in an online environment and anyone who wishes to achieve high customer satisfaction online would do well to mirror the behaviours and processes of both Amazon and Play.

Another potential surprise comes from the placing of Dunelm Mill in the top five.  Now I personally know little to nothing about this organisation which just goes to show you don’t have to be the first name on everyone’s lips to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction.

The results also gave Marks and Spencers its first top five placing which reflects the organisation’s heightened commitment to customer service and customer satisfaction.  If M&S continue to put the customer first I expect to see them cement their position and maybe even improve upon it.

One of the principle things that all of the above organisations has in common is what they do when things go wrong.  David Barford, Director of Selling Operations at John Lewis in fact said -

“The big factor is trust.  In turbulent times if something goes wrong with a purchase, a customer wants to know that they will be looked after.”

When we have discussed online retailers in the past we have marked out their response when something goes wrong as a key factor in their delivery of customer satisfaction.  It is too easy to hide behind the fact that you are an online retailer and to go missing when soemthing goes wrong.  Clearly this is not the case with Amazon and Play.

Returning to our good friend John Lewis again they not only scored highly on their customer satisfaction face-to-face but also on their online store.  Anyone who has purchased something from the John Lewis website will know that the company’s online presence exactly mimics their offline offering.  Everything is clean and simple and easy to understand and when things go wrong they do not hide.

So what is it that makes John Lewis perform so well?  Incidentally the supermarket chain Waitrose also won first prize for customer satisfaction in their own category too so it is not a fluke.

It is almost impossible to pinpoint one specific thing that John Lewis does that makes it stand head and shoulders above its rivals but if I had to pick one thing it would be consistency.  Anyone managing a customer service function is constantly striving for consistency.  One of our clients recently said to us after the completion of a series of successful customer service courses – “if I could establish one thing it would be consistency.”  They went on to say that they would in fact rather be consistently good across the board than sporadically excellent and poor in equal measure.

John Lewis has dedicated a great deal of time and commitment to ensuring that the levels of service you receive from all of their staff and even their website is consistent at all times.  You know what to expect with JL and you are rarely let down.

Finally John Lewis also has a first mover advantage which cannot be underestimated.  During the 80′s Kwik Fit made a commitment to customer service that blew their competition away and it is only really in the last decade that people have managed to catch up.

John Lewis keep finishing top year on year because they have such a great head-start that they can just keep tweaking and constantly improving and others struggle to even get near them.

There is a lesson here and that is that if you can be the first or indeed one of the first organisations in your marketplace that changes the rules and ups the ante on how customers are dealt with you can establish such a gap that it can take years if not decades to overcome.