The UK Customer Experience Index (UKCEI) – Presented by Customer Experience Magazine and featuring the unique methodology of SpectrumInsight.
In this, the first release of results for the UKCEI, we can reveal that Topshop have been giving their customers a truly great experience, based on the number of positive responses they have received using the Index differentiators.
The UKCEI is based on a two-month trawl of twitter comments for key positive words such as great service, friendly, ease of use, desirable product, and key negative words such as fear, disgust, anger, contempt or sadness.
Based on this methodology, each release of the Index may well feature different brands. Those featured in this issue’s index are those mentioned most often from a very sizeable sample. For this sample some 350,000 tweets were captured throughout January and February, with around 250,000 of these tweets containing either some or all of the positive or negative key words.
The chart below gives a flavour of the comments that are being tweeted and from which the conclusions are drawn.
A few points worthy of note.
1. The CEI is driven by consumers. A criticism often thrown at Twitter as a source is that it is biased, with the implication being that ‘traditional’ surveys are not. In fact, traditional surveys tend to be based on a list of pre-chosen brands that consumers are then asked about, which is inherently also biased. Twitter is increasingly used by consumers across the social spectrum and age groups, and is rapidly becoming more and more representative of the overall population.
2. Even brands at or near the top of the index still have complaints made about them because, no-one is perfect. What the index does is provide a very good way of comparing brands with each other, with those at or near the top generating much higher positive responses than negative ones.
3. The list of brands on the index is likely to vary from month to month depending on the volumes of comments they generate (there are a lot of brands that generate comments but not in sufficient volume to appear in the index). We would also expect to see quite a lot of change in terms of the brands that appear as consumers change their views and opinions. For instance, only NatWest appears in the index whereas last summer it’s likely that most, if not all of the banks would have done so; and this is why there are a number of grocery retailers in the list at the moment.
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