Engagement and Customer Satisfaction. Learn from the Locals

I’ve compiled the January 2010 UK Institute of Customer Service (ICS) figures into a table ranked by score (rounded to whole numbers) irrespective of sector. Local services make up four of this top ten. John Lewis/Waitrose take two more of the places, and Marks & Spencer/Marks & Spencer Food take two more. Toby Carvery and Virgin Holidays complete the top ten.

We can clearly see local businesses emerging with good results. I think this is because small local businesses worry less about things like vague customer satisfaction figures, and more about personal, connected service. Too often big brands risk losing that sense of connectedness as they strive to hit a spurious measure. Deliver service purposefully, and the scores will come. Very encouraging.

If you want to see where your company ranks, the full table can be downloaded here. By measuring scores irrespective of sector, some interesting results emerge. For example, despite all the industrial unrest and inconvenience caused by that, British Airways scrapes into the top 25.

It would be interesting to overlay employee engagement scores onto this table. I expect that the local businesses would disappear from sight. That’s not a criticism, it’s just that they don’t need to measure employee engagement, it’s literally staring them in the face. I’m not convinced that most big businesses need to measure it either; they just do it because everyone else does. And in so doing, most businesses risk chasing an improving employee engagement measure, instead of actually engaging. As you can see from the chart above, there appears to be a connection. If anyone has any further research on this that they’re willing to share feel free to post it here.

The July ICS figures are just out and it’s slightly disappointing to see they make fewer results available. I’ll carry out a similar comparison of these figures and publish them soon. Meantime if you have any stories of local v global, better or worse, feel free to share them with us.