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Toyota, Honda Dealers Top Temkin’s 2018 Customer Experience Ratings

Auto dealers tied for 12th out of 20 industries ranked in the eighth edition of Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Ratings. Ford and Mercedes-Benz dealers also earned top rankings.

by Staff
April 12, 2018
2 min to read


WABAN, Mass. — Toyota and Honda dealers deliver the best customer experience, according to the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings, an annual customer experience benchmark of companies based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers.

Of the 18 auto dealers included in this year's Ratings, Toyota earned the highest score with a rating of 73%, putting it in 95th place overall out of 318 companies across 20 industries. Honda came in second place with a score of 72% and overall rank of 109th. Two other auto dealers received a "good" rating – Ford and Mercedes-Benz. Both of these companies received a score of 70% and placed 137th overall.

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Overall, the auto dealer industry averaged a 66% rating in the 2018 edition of the Temkin Experience Ratings, and tied for 12th place out of 20 industries. However, the segment’s average rating dropped three percentage-points between 2017 and 2018 (68.6% to 65.6%).

The ratings of all auto dealers in the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings are as follows:

  1. Toyota: 73%

  2. Honda: 72%

  3. Ford: 70%

  4. Mercedes-Benz: 70%

  5. Chevrolet: 69%

  6. Hyundai: 68%

  7. Subaru: 67%

  8. Buick: 67%

  9. Nissan: 67%

  10. Cadillac: 66%

  11. Kia: 63%

  12. Dodge: 63%

  13. Jeep: 61%

  14. Mazda: 58%

  15. Audi: 56%

  16. BMW: 53%

  17. Chrysler: 53%

  18. CarMax: 43%

"Of all the industries we looked at this year, auto dealers saw the steepest drop in their industry average customer experience,” said Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group. “This decline is the result of double-digit drops from a few auto dealers.”

Now in its eighth year of publication, the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings is a comprehensive benchmark of customer experience, evaluating 318 companies across 20 industries. To generate these ratings, Temkin Group asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to evaluate their recent experiences with a company across three dimensions: success (can you do what you want to do?), effort (how easy is it to work with the company?), and emotion (how do you feel about the interactions?). Temkin Group then averaged these three scores to produce each company's Temkin Experience Rating.

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In these ratings, a score of 70% or above is considered "good," and a score of 80% or above is considered "excellent," while a score below 60% is considered "poor."

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