Supermarket customer service: Who comes out on top?

This week, Co-op was the latest shop to announce its new price reduction scheme for members, a week after Sainsbury’s announced the new Nectar prices available in stores to rival Tesco’s Clubcard offers.

But with the likes of M&S and Waitrose going viral recently for offering some surprisingly cheap deals on food, SaaSGenius.com wanted to uncover which supermarkets are going further in a bid to retain its customers by offering the best customer service. The study marked 10 of the biggest supermarkets on the number of contact options available, as well as how long it took to get a response and how quickly a typical customer service issue was resolved.

M&S was revealed as the top scorer with 68.4/100, whilst Co-op placed just fifth, at 36.2/100.

Aldi and Lidl represent 2 out of the 3 supermarkets to offer up to 4 different methods of customer support, however the German discount retailers still did not rank top in this study.

M&S checks out as the most super supermarket for help desk for customers, scoring 68.4 out of 100. The M&S live chat experience proved to be very helpful, with customers being connected to a human after just 2 messages, plus issues being resolved in only 3 messages.

With overall scores of 65.6 and 58.4, there was not much to separate second-placed Lidl and third-placed Aldi. Lidl proved to be the better supermarket to get in touch with via Twitter, scoring 6.3 out of 10 in this category. Meanwhile, the best way to contact Aldi looks to be via email, with the supermarket scoring 8.9 out of 10 in this department.

Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco may well be four of the most familiar names on UK high streets, but when it comes to efficient customer service, these ‘big 4’ supermarkets fall behind the competition.

Tesco offering Homebase products.

With a low score of just 23.7 out of 100, Asda was truly left needing a clean-up in aisle ten. The Leeds-based supermarket giant offered three methods of customer service, but unfortunately, long waiting times of 54 minutes over the phone let Asda down.

Morrisons also offered three methods of customer service, however, an on-site live chat help desk was not one of them. The Bradford-based supermarket also took over 72 hours to respond to an email query. This left Morrisons in ninth place with an underwhelming score of 25.1 out of 100.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s sank to seventh place and Tesco trollied to eighth, with scores of 31.7 and 27.6 respectively. These two popular supermarkets offered fewer methods of customer service than any of their competitors. Sainsbury’s offers just 2 ways to get in touch (phone and social media), while Tesco had just 1 (phone).

Overall, grocery suppliers proved to be one of the easiest industries for customers to get in contact with, with 8 out of 10 grocery supplier companies offering 3 or more methods of customer service. The industry average score was a notable 42.73 out of 100.

Source: SaaSGenius.com