​Timpson, M&S and John Lewis in the top new customer service ranking

Timpson, which the ICS classes as a services provider rather than a retailer, was once again the highest-rated business in the UK. The M&S score of 85.8 out of 100 was only for its food business, but its non-food offering also performed well (83.4). 

Speaking about the results, ICS chief executive Jo Causon said that their research shows that brands that customers rate highly tend to have better bottom lines.

“Those organisations that have higher levels of customer satisfaction over a longer period of time have higher financial returns,” she says, “They also have more engaged staff and, in a world where all organisations are under pressure in being able to recruit and retain the right levels of staff, that is really important.”

Non-food retail leads the pack

Investing in staff and customer service will likely be a hard sell this January given so many retailers are speaking about the financial challenges caused by changes to national insurance. Yet the results suggest that retailers are starting from a strong base.

Non-food retailers were judged to be the best-performing category out of the 13 sectors that the UKCSI breaks organisations into. Banks and building societies are their closest rivals, with brands like Starling Bank and Nationwide also doing well.

Average customer satisfaction for non-food retail was 80.6 out of 100, while the average for all organisations was 76.1. Besides John Lewis, other top non-food retailers included Holland & Barrett and Amazon.co.uk.

Customers are considerably more satisfied with the websites of non-food retailers than they are with other sectors, while the share of customers experiencing a problem (10.6%) was at its lowest level since July 2016.

John Lewis has made efforts to double down on customer service as a differentiator from other brands, bringing back its price promise and investing in new technology to improve the in-store experience.

“Those brands really understand the end-to-end customer experience, not just the transactional elements, but understand that we’ve got hard-earned cash. We want an experience rather than it just being a transaction – they do better jobs,” said Causon.

Food retail strong, but room for improvement

Customer satisfaction for food retailers improved marginally from last year to stand at 79.9 out of 100, with the share of consumers experiencing problems dropping too.

Besides M&S, Ocado was the best-performing food retailer, demonstrating the importance of a strong online offering.

Among those customers that did have trouble with a food retailer, quality or reliability of goods/services was the biggest issue, though the performance of staff was also regularly mentioned.

The UKCSI is published twice a year and drawn from 59,000 responses by 15,000 individual consumers, representative of the UK population. Employees of UK businesses are surveyed as part of the report and the results showed that 64% spend part of their time resolving service failure issues.

For the average employee, this equated to four days per month resolving problems, up from 3.3 days in July 2024.