High street heroes: the top five shops for customer service excellence

Our choice of where we shop can depend on many factors  – whether it be value for money, the quality of products or the convenience of a nearby location.

But for many, the insurance of excellent customer service is a big draw. We’ve been able to return to our high streets and shopping centres since June so Resolver was keen to take a look at which shopping chains are offering top class service to their customers – particularly during those moments when things go wrong. 

Resolver’s top five shops for service excellence have been called out by their own customers as those hitting the mark. Using the analysis of more than 61,000 cases relating to in-store shopping over the year to September 2020, we can reveal who has topped our charts for customer service excellence, so you can see which shops our users have rated both before the pandemic began and during the months of lockdown and beyond.

Top five stores

Our top five shops for customer service excellence are a mixture of clothing, grocery, and DIY retailers. Find out who they are and why they stand out below.

Top-placed Farmfoods is the only shop chain in our analysis to achieve five stars out of five in all seven of Resolver’s measures of customer service. The frozen food retailer has shown consistent performance over the year with a Resolver Score of 96%. Second-placed Greggs’ Resolver Score of 91% is indicative of its high performance in almost all seven measures including ease of complaining to the company and resolution time.

New Look meanwhile is the only retailer to place in our top five for both its in-store and online offer. In store, the clothing chain scored five stars for all but one of our metrics, including resolution rate, ease and response time, with three stars for resolution time.

All our top shops scored five stars out of five for the overall satisfaction of their customers and the likelihood to recommend, alongside resolution rates (the percentage of cases resolved to a customer’s satisfaction) and the ease of complaining.

How we score

Our scores are drawn from the feedback of Resolver users, along with measures used to assess response and resolution times. 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 a company when a case is closed. 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%.

Resolver requires a minimum of 30 customer feedback responses for a company for it to be included in our series of customer service excellence, which is perhaps why you may not see some of your most-loved brands here. We are working on widening our analysis.

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

• Response Time: the time it takes the company to provide an initial response 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 end of a 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 this article, or any other retailer, then we can help. Use Resolver to raise your complaint or query.