Customer Service

Beyond the store: Retailers providing best end-to-end customer experience in 2024

Excellence in the holistic end-to-end customer experience is what was examined when partnering with Forbes on the 2024 Customer Experience All-Star list.

Photo: Adobe Stock

March 20, 2024 by Mark Calvillo — Senior Vice President of Product, Restaurant365

How we think about our favorite stores goes beyond just the shopping experience. Sure, the nicety of the store displays matters, and we like when a store is clean. We pay attention to the prices and how easy the checkout process is. But, our overall experience doesn't stop when we leave the store. When we go home, we taste the food, try on the clothes, plug in the new gaming console — we use the products we just purchased.

If we like the products, great. Now let's see how well the clothes hold up after a few weeks. If we don't enjoy the products we purchased, our retail experience hinges on the return process and the helpfulness of customer support agents.

Excellence in that holistic end-to-end customer experience is what was examined when partnering with Forbes on the 2024 Customer Experience All-Star list.

Top takeaways for retail from Forbes 2024 Customer Experience All-Stars List

To compile the Forbes 2024 Customer Experience All-Stars list, powered by HundredX, more than 4.2 million pieces of customer feedback left on over 3,100 brands was leveraged to identify the ones that provide the best customer experience through a questionnaire designed to be short and easy for real shoppers to share feedback on top-of-mind brands. This list only considered brands with more than 1,000 pieces of feedback in 2023.

For the retail industry, that figure includes more than 1.1 million pieces of feedback on 435 retail brands.

A total of 56 retail brands made the list, which celebrates the top 300 brands from over 80 industries.

The top factor cited by customers reviewing businesses providing the best customer experience was quality, followed by speed or convenience, then the people and service provided.

Grocery had more companies on the list than any other segment of retail, with eleven brands. According to customer feedback, these grocers all provided excellent quality and service at reasonable prices. There were four in the top 20: H-E-B (#3), Trader Joe's (#7), Wegmans Food Markets (#14), and Publix (#19).

H-E-B jumped 32 spots from #35 in the Forbes 2023 list to be the top grocer at #3 overall on this year's list. H-E-B's remarkable rise underscores significant improvements the grocery store made across important drivers of customer satisfaction.

Customer perception of the brand's availability, pricing and selection all improved significantly, reflecting strategic investments in expanding store locations and increasing fulfillment options.

H-E-B's success is also based on its clean stores, quality service and efficient checkout processes. The brand ranked in the top 10 out of more than 60 grocers in 14 of the 16 drivers of customer satisfaction we track for the industry.

More lessons from the top

The other retail industries with the most brands on this year's Forbes list were specialty (10 brands), fashion & apparel (nine) and convenience stores (five).

The top specialty retailer was See's Candies (#8 overall), dominating competition on quality, cleanliness and presentation. The top fashion brand was Hoka (#17 overall), crushing peers on sizes & fit, comfort and quality.

Convenience stores in particular stand out for having three brands in the top 20 – Buc-ee's (#1), Kwik Trip (#10) and Wawa (#16) — second most represented only to grocery stores. Across c-stores, the top customer needs are convenience, cleanliness, competitive gas prices and speed. The top-ranked c-stores do very well across these factors.

The retail industry is a very competitive sector, with the leading brands clearly understanding and fulfilling their customers' top needs, including a wide selection of quality products, a speedy, convenient buying process and competitive prices. The positive perception of cleanliness in the convenience stores who topped the list, despite the broader industry's overall lag, reflects these companies' proficiency in meeting customer expectations and understanding the job the customers are hiring them to do.

About Mark Calvillo

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Mark Calvillo is the Senior Vice President of Product, driving overall product strategy and leading the product management and user experience teams. Mark is a strategic product management and innovation professional with entrepreneurial skills and 20+ years of technology and product leadership experience over both web and mobile. He is skilled in managing the full product life cycle (conception to consumer) by collaborating with customers, technical teams and executives. He holds a degree in Information Technology from Chapman University.

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