Customer service excellence: celebrating the UK’s top shops

At Resolver, our passion is helping you right the wrongs of bad customer service and making sure that your rights are protected. It’s perhaps not a surprise that we’ve seen rising complaints – particularly for online shopping – over recent months, and while the high street was locked down for most of the first half of this year, complaints didn’t disappear overnight. 

While shops are opening their doors again, and online retail therapy continues to be high in demand, the landscape will be different for a while. So we thought it was time to celebrate those companies that have been excelling at providing top level customer service – based purely on what our users have told us (with some technical data analysis of course). And where better to start than by naming the top shops in the UK? 

Those that use Resolver know that we ask every single person who closes a case how satisfied they are with how a company has handled their complaint. We assess their feedback on a range of metrics, including response times, how easy it is to raise a complaint, and how likely they are to recommend a company.

We wanted to use this feedback – of more than 156,000 responses to Resolver between April 2019 and March this year – to help you see who tops the shops, and perhaps help you choose who to use with confidence that you’ll receive great service. 

Here are the results.

On the button: top online retailers

Newlook.com claims the top spot for customer service in our rankings, with an outstanding 99%. Close behind is Shein.com, with Boohoo.com claiming the last of our podium positions.

Both Newlook.com and Shein.co.uk (along with Wayfair.co.uk and Mandmdirect.com) offered – quite literally – a five-star service to their customer in the three R’s – response time, resolution time and resolution rate. In other words, they were quick to respond to their customers in the first place, with a speedy follow-up to get the problem sorted and the proportion of those issues resolved was incredibly high. 

Our top online shops for customer service is a mixed bag of sectors, but it’s interesting that half of the top 10 are clothing retailers. What this is likely to mean is that they have been highly engaged with customers across many potential issues with shopping online, including the tricky to master delivery and returns service.

All our top 10 online shops scored five stars for the likelihood of customers to recommend them to others and for overall satisfaction of the customer service experience from these retailers. Take a look at who’s made the cut below.

Top 10 Online Shops

Top of the shops

They’ve been closed for almost three months, but before that some of our high street stalwarts were still delivering excellent customer service. Topping the shops for Resolver users was Farmfoods, Costco, Screwfix and New Look, with each scoring an impressive 94%.

Farmfoods and Costco scored an impressive five stars (out of five) across all our seven measures – meaning that not only were they easy to contact, with excellent resolution times and rates but their customers were highly satisfied with the service they received and they were likely to recommend these retailers. 

Again, many retail sectors feature in the top 10, but for in-store shopping, it’s food retailers that hold the most spots, meaning that some of our most essential shopping is also hitting the spot with our customers for the top service they are receiving from these companies.

Find out who Resolver users have rated as their top 10 shops for customer service below.

Top 10 Shops

Best of both worlds

We know how different shopping online is to stepping inside a store – something that has been more pronounced in recent months. Relying on the delivery of something instead of just being able to pick it up, trusting the security when you put your credit details in and potentially having to go through a lengthy returns process are just a few things that crop up. 

But it’s clear that despite the big difference in shopping experience, companies can operate both offline and online and still offer great customer service. Three retailers in particular saw excellent customer feedback regardless of how they shopped with them – and this top service means New Look, Screwfix and Ann Summers appear in both our online and in-store top 10s.

How we score

The one-line answer is that our scores are all down to the feedback of Resolver users. But every bit of feedback has a story behind it and our data specialists analyse all the information in detail.

Every Resolver user is asked how satisfied they are with how the company they shopped with. Our analysis of all these responses focuses on seven measurements of those aspects of customer service to come up with a score out of five. To get five stars for one of our measurements, a company has to score within the top 20%.

Here’s our rundown of the seven measurements we use to score customer service:

Response Time: the time it takes the company to respond to the customer

Resolution Time: the time it takes to resolve the complaint

Resolution Rate: the percentage of the company’s cases satisfactorily resolved from the consumer’s perspective

Feeling Change: the change in the customer’s sentiment from the beginning to the end of the case

Ease: how easy it is to complain

Consumer Advocacy Score (CAS): how likely the customer is to recommend the company

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): how satisfied the customer is with the company.

If you have a complaint about one of the shops in our top 10, or any other retailer, we can help. Use Resolver to raise your complaint or query.