There are a lot of customer service ratings out there. comScore (News - Alert) does a great deal of them, and many marketers are familiar with the Temkin Group’s rating of prominent companies (the Temkin Experience Rating 2014) based on the quality of customer service they offer. What’s been absent from all these, however, are rankings solely based on the quality of mobile customer support a company offers.
Mobile customer support solutions provider Apptentive recently compiled such a list by grabbing the top 100 companies with mobile apps from the Temkin Group’s ratings and compiling what it’s calling its “Love Score.” In a recent blog post, the company’s Ezra Siegel noted that the mobile platform is still relatively new to many large brands and providing a high level of customer experience is proving to be rather difficult, even for companies that provide good customer support in other channels.
“A mobile app’s ‘Love Score’ gives a company insight into the customer sentiment for their app and how it compares to other apps,” wrote Siegel. “After calculating the Love Score for these 100 companies, we were able to get a better sense of how these customer-centric brands were performing on mobile.”
So who came out on top?
Domino’s Pizza, which isn’t surprising, since the pizza take-out outfit has built a heavy presence in mobile for pizza order-placing. Following Domino’s was Citizen’s Bank, USAA, CVS, Alaska Airlines and Barnes & Noble. Rounding out the top 10 were Pizza Hut, Walmart, Sheraton hotels and Vanguard financial services.
Who came out near the bottom? Prominent brands whose mobile efforts are falling far short include Toys R’ Us, Albertson’s, BJ’s Wholesale Club, JC Penney, PetSmart, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Taco Bell, Kohl’s, Chevrolet and supermarket chain Stop & Shop.
Apptentive also compared the average Love Score of apps in the Apple (News - Alert) App Store and Google Play Store and found that the majority of companies that rank the highest on Temkin’s customer experience list fall below average.
So why are some companies that are otherwise doing well with customer support failing so miserably in the mobile app arena?
Siegel notes that it may be a combination of factors, including not taking the mobile channel seriously enough coupled with a lack of investment in a high quality mobile customer support platform. They also may not understand their customers’ wants and needs in the mobile arena, or their customer support simply doesn’t move fast enough for the mobile channel.
Whatever the reasons, prominent brands may not be prominent brands in the future if they don’t begin serving customers through one of the fastest-growing channels in customer support.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson