Methodology
The 2022 America’s Best Customer Service rankings were identified from the results of an independent survey of more than 25,000 U.S. customers who have either made purchases, used services or gathered information about products or services in the past three years. Customers evaluated several brands: in total 160,000 evaluations were collected. The awarded brands each received on average close to 100 evaluations from customers.
The survey was conducted on retailers and service providers from 161 categories, providing results for a broad-spectrum of customer experiences in traditional retail, online and service segments. For each category, the most relevant brands were included in the scope of the survey according to reputation, turnover or market share.
In the brick and mortar categories, only retailers and service providers present in at least two census regions have been included in the list. In the online categories, only retailers and service providers present mainly online have been included in the list. For retailers and service providers with online presences and store networks, only the core business was taken into account. In total the survey took an average of 9-11 minutes to complete and the field period ran from May to July 2021.
The final assessment and rankings were based on the likelihood of recommendation (50 percent of the final score) and five evaluation criteria (also 50 percent of the final score). The criteria are:
→ QUALITY OF COMMUNICATION:
Measures whether the contact (via e-mail, telephone or face to face) was friendly or polite.
→ PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE:
Measures the quality of information received and whether questions were answered correctly and in sufficient detail.
→ RANGE OF SERVICES:
Measures the variety of solutions available to fulfill one’s personal expectations.
→ CUSTOMER FOCUS:
Measures whether the customer feels acknowledged and important.
→ ACCESSIBILITY:
Measures the availability of customer service in a shop or on a helpline.
The top 3-5 brands based on category size receiving the highest scores in each category were awarded as having America’s Best Customer Service 2022. For the full methodology, see newsweek.com/abcs-2022