Amazon takes the lead position in Forrester’s inaugural Customer Experience Index (CXi) for the UK. The CXi measures and ranks the customer experience of 28 large UK brands across seven different industries, based on a survey of 2,000 UK consumers. Amazon secured the highest overall score in the ranking, a CXi of 81, qualifying the experience the online retailer provides to consumers as “good.” Closely following Amazon are Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Debenhams, Next, and Boots, which earned retailers the highest overall customer experience ratings at the industry level, followed by hotels. What is striking about the results is that no brand was given an “excellent” CXi score, and UK consumers rate their experiences as mostly underwhelming (from “very poor” to “OK”). Bringing up the rear were TV service providers and mobile telecom operators, whose experiences were rated as “poor” to “very poor.”

Additional findings from the CXi UK ranking include:

  • Even the top-scoring brands in the mobile telecom sector — O2 and Virgin Mobile — rated worse than the lowest-performing retailer.
  • Hotels and TV service providers only show a seven point gap between the best and the worst score, which suggests a tough competitive environment in which differentiation of experience is challenging.
  • Hotels and banks made it into the “OK” bracket. Electronics manufacturers were rated as “poor.”

“With the majority of British online consumers rating the customer experience provided by UK brands “very poor,” “poor,” or “OK,” the need to apply greater discipline to improve is evident,” said Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha, senior analyst at Forrester. “Customer experience decision-makers should use the CXi as a galvanizing metric to transform their organizations in the age of the customer.” 

For this study, Forrester asked UK consumers in the survey to select the companies they interact most out of seven industries — airlines, banks, electronics manufacturers, hotels, retailers, TV service providers, and wireless service providers — and to answer three questions about each brand in regard to customer experience: how enjoyable and easy they are to do business with, and how effective they are at meeting customer needs.

For more information, also see this blog post by Jonathan Browne.