WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. -

J.D. Power and Associates released a list Thursday of the 40 brands — spread throughout several industries, including the automotive field — that it considers as having the strongest customer service practices. Companies from more than 20 industries are represented and several of these winners are from the auto industry.

In fact, five were automakers, those being Cadillac, Jaguar, Lexus, Lincoln and Mercedes-Benz.

Gary Temple, president of Jaguar Land Rover North America, offered his reaction to Jaguar making the list.

“The entire Jaguar organization, from the designers and engineers in the U.K. through to the dealers in the United States, have a commitment to serving our Jaguar owners, backed by Jaguar Platinum Coverage,” he shared. “We appreciate that J.D. Power and Associates has selected Jaguar as a Customer Service Champion and will continue to make customer care a top priority at Jaguar.”

The other auto-related companies that made the list, in alphabetical order, are:

—Auto-Owners Insurance
—Enterprise Rent-A-Car
—USAA Insurance

J.D. Power determines its list of champions from customer feedback. The firm used the “J.D. Power 5 Ps” to evaluate companies with those five criteria being “People, Presentation, Price, Product and Process.”

All of the 40 brands on the overall winners list were in the top 5 percent of all the brands J.D. Power examined (which was more than 800) as part of its "Achieving Excellence in Customer Service" special report rolled out on Thursday.

Included in the cross-industry report is analysis of customer feedback, opinions and perceptions of the 800-plus companies. J.D. Power compiled this data from studies it conducted from 2000 to 2010.

As far as the Champions list, these brands stand out in their own industries and when compared to brands in other fields.

“Today’s consumers expect companies to do it all and have the right people, the right presentation, the right price, the right product and the right process,” said Gary Tucker, who is J.D. Power’s senior vice president of global services and emerging industries.

“Brands identified as J.D. Power Customer Service Champions are getting all of these things right. Some are even outperforming the best of their peers in meeting heightened customer expectations,” he added.

Brands in product-based industries — which obviously include automakers — have seen their average satisfaction scores climb in the last 10 years, while service-oriented brands have been static, according to J.D. Power.

Moreover, the disparity between the top brands in service industries and the weakest brands in the service industries has widened in the last seven years.

“Elevating service levels is particularly challenging for a variety of reasons,” Tucker shared. “Customers have a seemingly contradictory expectation for both standardization and customization and expect to receive service that is both consistent and reliable and, at the same time, customized to their specific needs.

“With the availability of real-time information from the Internet, customers increasingly compare service experiences across brands and industries,” he noted.
“As a result, when one company raises the bar for service quality within an industry, it raises the bar for other industries, as well.

J.D. Power went on to note that strong levels of customer satisfaction can prove beneficial to brands. Not surprisingly, customer retention and pricing advantages are often experienced in a greater degree by companies with high scores than those with low scores. Moreover, brands with strong satisfaction scores also tend to have to spend less to bring in new customers.

Consider the following data from J.D. Power.

Almost two-thirds (62 percent) of Customer Service Champions’ customers claimed they “definitely would” suggest that family and friends utilize the brand. Of the hundreds of brands included in the study that weren’t deemed Champions, less than a quarter of their customers (23 percent) would definitely offer a recommendation.

Moreover, the proportion of Customer Service Champions’ customers who “definitely would” buy again from the respective brand was 58 percent. Only a tad more than a third (36 percent) of customers for non-Champion brands echoed that sentiment.

“To be good in any industry, it makes sense to look at the best practices across industries,” Tucker stated. “Every day, consumers interact with companies from a myriad of industries. Invariably, they compare the quality of these service experiences.

“Industries and companies should be doing the same if they expect to keep pace in today’s increasingly competitive environment,” he shared.