Temkin Experience Ratings Overview and FAQs

We recently released the sixth annual Temkin Experience Ratings that ranks the customer experience of 294 companies across 20 industries based on an online survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Here’s a video that provides some details about the Temkin Experience Ratings:

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions (FAQs):

• How much does it cost to participate? Nothing. Temkin Group does not charge companies to participate in any of the Temkin Ratings. We also do not solicit companies to “help them” improve their ratings. the only way to improve your ratings is to focus on improving your customer experience. Temkin Group can certainly help in that area, but we make no promises about what will happen to any company’s scores.
• Why does Temkin Group publish the Temkin Ratings? Our goal is to shine a bright light on the state of customer experience (and other areas for other ratings). We feel that the best way to do that is to provide a fully independent, data-centric benchmark that cuts across industries, and to make the results freely available to the public. You can download a free copy of the Temkin Experience Ratings report of see all of the results on the Temkin Ratings website.
• Our company did well in the ratings, can we publicize the results? Yes, as long as you follow our guidelines.  We even have badges that you can use if your company is in the top 10% overall or the leader in one of our 20 industries.
• How do you select the industries? Temkin Group selects industries that it believes will showcase a wide breadth of customer experience. The industries need to have at least three players large enough to be included in our published ratings. Every year we re-examine our list of industries. In 2015, for instance, we added utilities.
• How do consumers select the companies? We list a number of companies in each industry and consumers select the ones that they’ve interacted with during the previous 60 days.
• How can we get our company included in the ratings? Temkin Group does not look for, nor accept, requests for inclusion in the ratings. We select the companies that we believe are most likely to have at least 100 respondents, which is our minimum level for inclusion in our published research and data.
• How do you get the survey respondents? We purchase access to online consumer panels from third party firms, and they ensure that we get the required responses. We set quotas to make sure that our total base of respondents mirrors the U.S. census distribution for age, gender, income, ethnicity, and region. We do not get customer contact information from companies, but instead ask consumers to identify the companies that they’ve interacted with during the previous 60 days.
• How do you calculate the ratings? We asked consumers to rate three components of the experience, Success, Effort, and Emotion, on a 7-point scale. For each component, we take the percentage of consumers that gave a rating of 6 or 7 and subtract the percentage that gave a rating of 1, 2, or 3. This results in a “net goodness” rating for each of the three components. The overall Temkin Experience Rating is an average of the three “net goodness” percentages.
• Why don’t you weight the components (success, effort, emotion)? If we started to add weightings to the components, then it would appear as if one is more important than the others. All three elements are part of consumers’ overall experience.
• We’re a <name the industry>, should we really worry about emotion? Yes! We get asked this for many industries, most often from health plans and TV service providers. First of all, if you’re one of those firms, I’m confident that you have an opportunity to improve across all three dimensions of customer experience. Instead of thinking about trying to reach the positive emotion ratings of other industries, it might be good to eliminate some of the negative emotions you deliver.
• Isn’t it unfair to rate our company with retailers and supermarkets, since our interactions are more complicated? No! Consumers develop their expectations for customer experience based on their interactions with a large variety of companies across many industries. The Temkin Experience Ratings provides an opportunity to compare companies’ customer experience with their industry peers as well as with companies from other industries.
• Why do TV service providers, Internet service providers, and health plans get such low ratings? There are some industries that have habitually poor customer experience. In many of the cases, these problem stems from some form of monopolistic power. TV service providers and Internet service providers have carved out regions and have limited competition, while health plans have created monopolies for employees through their contracts with employers. The good news: In most of these cases, these monopoly powers are being challenged by structural changes and new competitors.
• How can I get data from previous years? You can download our free report for each year of the Temkin Experience Ratings. Here are links to the 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 ratings. You can also see all of the data at the Temkin Ratings website, and there are links to previous years ratings as well. You can also purchase the datasets for each year if you want to see more of the details.