M&S Food has been ranked number one for customer experience in the Irish supermarket sector as part of the CXi Customer Experience report for 2023, jumping 30 places in the ranking since 2021.
This year, the annual report, which is now in its ninth year, saw 175 organisations featured in a survey on customer experience which subsequently resulted in a ranked league across eleven sectors.
M&S Food was ranked ninth in the overall survey, the highest ranked supermarket included in the survey, while M&S Retail is included as a separate brand and came in at 29th in the overall survey.
The report shows that customers ranked the brand favourably based on:
- M&S store colleagues’ deep personal relationships with customers;
- Trust in the brand and the ease with which to do business;
- ‘Sparks Reward’ digital programme which offers customer savings of up to 20%; and
- Unique technology such as the ‘Scan & Shop’ feature.
CX is a company that has been focusing on the scale of customer experience since 2015. Every year since then, it has published a Customer Experience report. The CX Framework is based on thousands of surveys and in-depth interviews with customers of companies across a variety of sectors to understand how they felt when they interacted with those companies.
Supermarket sector the top performing for customer experience
When analysing the customer experience at supermarkets against other types of businesses, the report saw the sector as a whole continued to show a strong performance in 2023 with an overall uplift in their score of 6%[1]. The sector remains in first place in the rankings for a fourth consecutive year with all Supermarket brands making it into the top 100.
M&S Food’s CXi score has risen by 13.4%, with the brand jumping more than 30 places since 2021.
The Scan & Shop feature was launched in 2022, as an integration of the Sparks loyalty scheme, which turns customers’ phones into a scanner and allows them to check out and pay on their own phone without queuing at the till. This is noted in the report as particularly convenient for ‘lunch time’ or ‘time poor’ customers who want to shop with speed.
The report concluded that M&S has made great strides linking with Irish producers through programmes such as Farm to Foodhall, and developing a significant Irish food base which was positively viewed by customers.
The full CXi 2023 report is available here.
[1] CXi Customer Experience Report 2023
