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The world’s most successful companies didn’t become that because of what they sell, but how they make customers feel and the experiences they provide. According to PwC, 73% of consumers say customer experience (CX) is a key factor in purchasing decisions, yet fewer than half feel providers deliver on it. That gap is where some business leaders have the chance to pull ahead of their competition.
This guide breaks down what “best-in-class CX” actually looks like, based on how leading organizations operationalize it at scale.
We evaluated companies across five core dimensions to determine who offers the best customer experience:
Across the CX programs we power at AskNicely, companies that consistently perform well in these areas see:
Exceptional customer experiences are a priority across all industries for good reason. Superior customer experience directly affects key metrics such as satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. By consistently exceeding customer expectations, companies create brand advocates who are not only likely to return but also to spread positive word-of-mouth recommendations to friends, family, and peers.Â
Moreover, in an era where brand reputation can make or break a business, customer experience serves as the linchpin of a company's image. Brands renowned for their exceptional CX earn the trust and admiration of their customers and solidify their position as market leaders, effectively differentiating themselves from competitors and driving sustainable business growth in the process.
Before diving into examples, it’s worth grounding this in reality. Great CX is the result of systems, behaviors, and culture working together.
The strongest programs consistently combine:
The most popular methods for measuring the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy include:
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): CSAT measures the level of customer satisfaction with a specific interaction or experience. Typically collected with post-interaction surveys, CSAT provides valuable insights into how well a company is meeting customer expectations at various points along the customer journey. Measures the level of satisfaction a customer has with a specific interaction or experience. Typically collected through post-interaction surveys, CSAT provides valuable insights into how well a company is meeting customer expectations at various touch points along the customer journey.
Net promoter score (NPS): NPS is a widely used customer experience management metric that assesses the likelihood of customers recommending a company to others. By categorizing customers as promoters, passives, or detractors based on their responses to a simple question ("How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?"), NPS offers a holistic view of customer loyalty and advocacy.
Customer effort score (CES): CES measures the level of effort a customer must exert to accomplish a particular task, such as resolving an issue or making a purchase. By minimizing customer effort, companies can enhance satisfaction and loyalty while reducing churn rates.
Customer reviews and social media sentiment: Customer feedback is ubiquitous across online review platforms and social media channels. Monitoring customer reviews and social media sentiment allows businesses to capture real-time insights into customer perceptions and identify emerging trends or issues.
First contact resolution (FCR): FCR evaluates whether a company resolves customer issues or inquiries during the initial contact. A high FCR rate indicates efficiency and effectiveness in addressing customer needs, leading to improved satisfaction and loyalty.
Let’s take a look at 10 companies setting the standard for awesome customer experience.Â
Mattress brand and AskNicely user, Saatva, uses AskNicely to deliver customer experiences that many businesses can only dream of.Â
Saatva’s passion for customer experience has enabled it to maintain excellent service, with 94% of customers giving a 5-star rating. The iconic mattress brand prioritizes excellence in every part of the customer experience. They use AskNicely to identify areas for improvement, communicate business success to executives, and distill data into actionable insights. The result is high response rates (28.5%) and a stellar CSAT score.Â
How does Saatva do it? They center CX improvement across every level of business, from customer service reps to executives, resulting in a CSAT of 4.85 and an impressive 28.5% survey response rate. They’re growing their business with customer feedback by constantly improving and evolving the customer experience.Â
“We are actively collecting feedback every hour of the day for any interaction. We value what our customers are saying about us, and I’m proud to say we have a positive rating. But on the occasional downside, where someone who maybe walked away feeling not heard or seen or didn’t have the most positive experience, we want to know and get them on the phone and have a chance to turn that situation around. We want everyone to walk away with a smile on their face,” Stephanie Young, Director of CX Platforms at Saatva, said during a webinar with AskNicely.
Takeaway: Saatva’s focus on the customer experience and effective communication with their customers has made them one of the most successful and popular businesses when it comes to customer experience. With an industry-high CSAT rating and unheard-of response rates.
Apple's CX strength is both the product and the frontline support architecture built around it. The Genius Bar, introduced in 2001, was a deliberate departure from the call-center model: Apple wanted expert, in-person support embedded inside the retail experience rather than outsourced or hidden behind a phone queue. Today, Apple stores handle tens of millions of support interactions annually, and Genius Bar employees undergo an extensive training program that blends technical certification with communication coaching — specifically designed to avoid jargon and create what Apple internally calls "enriching" rather than just problem-solving interactions.
Apple's net promoter score regularly ranks among the highest in the consumer electronics industry. Frontline employees are trained using a five-step service model — Approach, Probe, Present, Listen, End — designed to ensure every interaction resolves the emotional dimension of a problem, not just the technical one.
Takeaway: Seamless ecosystems reduce customer effort at every touchpoint, and high-touch in-person support ensures the brand relationship extends well beyond the point of purchase. Frontline coaching and empowerment are essential to this model.Â
Ritz-Carlton's most cited policy is its $2,000 per-guest discretionary spending authority — every employee, from housekeeper to front desk agent, can spend up to that amount to resolve a guest issue without seeking manager approval. But the policy is only half the picture. It works because of the cultural infrastructure built around it.
Every day, at every Ritz-Carlton property worldwide, all staff participate in a 15-minute "lineup" — a daily briefing where one of the company's 12 Service Values is read aloud and a real guest story illustrating that value is shared. These aren't invented anecdotes; they're submitted by employees from across the global portfolio and distributed centrally. This ritual keeps service standards concrete and emotionally resonant rather than abstract.
The second operational pillar is Ritz-Carlton's guest preference database. Staff log notes on individual guest preferences — preferred pillow firmness, dietary restrictions, how a guest takes their coffee, and whether they mentioned an anniversary — into a shared CRM accessible across all properties. A guest who stays in Dubai and later visits Boston can expect the same personalized details to already be in place on arrival.
The combined effect is measurable: Ritz-Carlton consistently ranks at the top of luxury hotel satisfaction surveys, and the brand's employee training investment — new hires receive 250 hours of training in their first year — reflects how seriously the company treats frontline capability as a CX asset.
Takeaway: Empowerment without training is chaos; training without empowerment is bureaucracy. Ritz-Carlton runs both in parallel to create service recovery that's both fast and genuinely personal.
Zappos built its CX reputation on a foundational operational choice: its contact center agents have no call time limits. While most customer service operations are measured on Average Handle Time — with industry benchmarks around 6 minutes per call — Zappos deliberately removes that constraint. The company's longest recorded customer service call lasted 10 hours and 43 minutes. Agents aren't rewarded for closing tickets quickly; they're rewarded for leaving customers happy.
This philosophy starts with hiring. Zappos uses a two-phase interview process where one phase evaluates cultural fit entirely independently of skills assessment.Â
Candidates who pass the skills interview but fail the culture interview are rejected. Once hired, all new employees — regardless of role — spend four weeks in customer service training. At the end of that period, Zappos famously offered each employee $2,000 to quit. The offer is designed to identify people who are in the role for the wrong reasons before they reach customers.
Zappos' return policy reflects the same long-term orientation: 365 days, free return shipping, no questions asked. The policy was considered operationally reckless by conventional retail logic, but Zappos found that customers who returned items were among their most loyal repeat purchasers — because the zero-risk experience converted hesitant browsers into confident buyers.
After its acquisition by Amazon, Zappos has maintained its distinct culture and operational model, treating it as a proof-of-concept that relationship-first service produces durable loyalty.
Takeaway: When you optimize for relationships instead of efficiency metrics, customers return, literally and figuratively.
Delta's CX investment is most visible in its Fly Delta app, which the airline has developed into a real-time service recovery tool rather than a simple booking interface. When a flight is disrupted, the app proactively presents rebooking options ranked by a passenger's historical preferences — window seat, specific alliance partners, connection time tolerance — before they've even reached the gate. This eliminates the traditional bottleneck of long customer service lines during irregular operations.
Delta's Medallion loyalty tiers feed into its personalization engine: the American airline tracks over 150 attributes per frequent flyer, including preferred snack selections, upgrade acceptance rates, and contact preference channels. During irregular operations, elite-tier members receive proactive outreach via their preferred channel — often resolved before they've noticed the disruption themselves.
Delta has also invested in its frontline data access. Gate agents now have customer-facing iPads pre-loaded with passenger profiles, enabling staff to greet high-value customers by name and proactively offer compensation without waiting for the customer to complain. In 2023, Delta reported its highest-ever customer satisfaction scores in J.D. Power's North American Airline Satisfaction study, which the company attributes in part to this shift from reactive to proactive service.
The airline's on-time performance investment reinforces its CX positioning: Delta has ranked first among major U.S. carriers for on-time arrival in multiple consecutive years, treating operational reliability as a CX feature, not just a logistics metric.
Takeaway: Proactive CX — resolving problems before customers surface them — dramatically reduces effort and builds the kind of trust that survives the occasional disruption.
Starbucks Rewards, with over 34 million active members in the U.S. as of 2024, is the engine behind the company's personalization strategy. The program collects behavioral data across every digital touchpoint (app orders, in-store scans, payment methods) and feeds it into a machine learning model that generates individualized offers. A customer who orders iced drinks on warm afternoons may receive a BOGO offer timed to a Thursday heat forecast; a lapsed user might receive a "we miss you" bonus star offer calibrated to their previous average spend.
Starbucks' Mobile app, Order & Pay, which accounts for roughly 30% of transactions at peak hours, has been a double-edged CX tool: it reduces queue friction for digital customers but creates congestion at pickup counters, which the company has since addressed by redesigning store layouts with dedicated mobile pickup areas, a physical CX intervention driven by behavioral data analytics.Â
The company's Deep Brew AI platform, developed internally, powers both the recommendation engine and labor scheduling optimization, ensuring stores are staffed to demand patterns rather than fixed schedules. This reduces wait times and increases barista capacity for the relational moments that data can't replicate — the regular customer greeted by name, the drink started before the order is spoken.
Starbucks has also used its app to run targeted promotions at the SKU level, driving traffic to specific products based on regional inventory or seasonal targets or goals — a tool that blends CX and commercial strategy.
Takeaway: Personalization works at scale when the digital layer generates insights, and the human layer delivers the moments that matter.
Costco's CX model is built on deliberate constraint. The company carries roughly 4,000 SKUs in a typical warehouse compared to 30,000 or more at a traditional supermarket. This isn't a limitation; it's a strategy. By buying in concentrated volume across fewer products, Costco negotiates deeper discounts and applies rigorous quality standards. The reduced selection eliminates decision fatigue while implicitly communicating curation: if Costco stocks it, it's passed an internal quality bar.
The membership model is the structural backbone of this trust relationship. Members pay an annual fee ($65 for Gold Star, $130 for Executive as of 2026) that generates over $4 billion in annual revenue, nearly equivalent to Costco's total operating income. Because the membership fee itself generates profit, Costco can price merchandise at near-cost margins, which creates a durable value perception that's difficult for non-membership retailers to replicate.
Costco's return policy is among the most generous in retail: most items can be returned at any time, no receipt required, with no defined return window, with the exception of electronics (90 days) and a few other categories. This eliminates purchase risk and reduces the consideration barrier for high-ticket items like appliances and tires.
The company's Employee Net Promoter Score and staff retention rates are consistently high for retail, driven by above-market wages and benefits. This translates directly into CX: low turnover means experienced staff who know the product and the layout.
Takeaway: Sometimes the best experience is the one that removes the most friction; fewer decisions, transparent pricing, and a return policy that makes trust the default.
Tesla's most operationally distinctive CX practice is over-the-air (OTA) software updates, which allow the company to add features, improve performance, and fix safety issues on vehicles already in customers' garages. A 2021 OTA update, for example, added new Autopilot functionality and improved regenerative braking behavior across millions of vehicles simultaneously — without a dealership visit or customer action. General Motors and Ford have since invested billions to replicate this capability; Tesla built it in from the beginning.
The direct-to-consumer omnichannel sales model eliminates the dealership layer entirely. Customers configure, purchase, and take delivery through Tesla's website and app. This removes the high-friction negotiation dynamic that most auto buyers cite as their most stressful purchase experience, and it allows Tesla to maintain price consistency — every customer in the same region pays the same price for the same configuration, without the variable discount pressure of dealer negotiations.
Tesla's mobile service fleet (frontline technicians who come to a customer's home or office)Â handles a significant portion of maintenance and repair needs that don't require a full service center. The company has used this capability as a selling point in markets with limited physical service infrastructure, and it directly addresses the post-purchase ownership anxiety that accompanies a new vehicle brand without a ubiquitous dealer network.
Tesla's app also serves as a CX hub: owners can pre-condition cabin temperature, check charge status, schedule service, and communicate with service teams entirely through mobile.
Takeaway: Post-purchase experience is a product decision, and the brands that build it in from the start create loyalty that outlasts the transaction.
Netflix's recommendation algorithm is estimated to influence over 80% of content watched on the platform — a figure that represents one of the highest ratios of algorithmic curation to user-initiated discovery in the industry. The system doesn't just recommend titles; it determines which artwork thumbnail is shown for each title to each individual user, selecting from a set of options based on viewing history. A user who watches a lot of films featuring strong female leads will see a different thumbnail for the same movie than a user who watches action content primarily. Netflix has reported that thumbnail optimization alone meaningfully increases click-through rates.
Netflix's continuous A/B testing infrastructure is equally sophisticated. At any given time, the company runs hundreds of simultaneous experiments across its global user base — testing everything from the color of the "Play" button to the default auto play behavior to the sequencing of search results. Product changes are only shipped when experiments demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in retention or customer engagement signals.
The company's decision to invest in download functionality for mobile users, its variable streaming quality based on detected bandwidth, and its password-sharing enforcement rollout in 2023 (which added paid sharing tiers rather than simply blocking access) all reflect a CX posture that tries to preserve value even when enforcing commercial guardrails.
Netflix's customer support model is also notable: the company routes contacts through an AI automation triage layer that resolves billing and access issues automatically for the majority of cases, reserving human agents for escalations — a design that reduces resolution time without sacrificing quality for complex problems.
Takeaway: The best CX programs are learning systems. Every interaction generates a signal, and every signal is an opportunity to make the next one better.
Chewy's CX reputation is built on a practice that sounds like a marketing stunt but is an operational reality at scale: when a customer contacts Chewy to report a pet's death, the company's policy is to issue a full refund on any unopened food or supplies without asking for a return — and then, within days, send a handwritten sympathy card signed by the customer service agent who handled the call, often accompanied by flowers or a custom portrait of the pet painted by a Chewy artist
Thousands of customers have shared these cards on social media, generating earned media that Chewy has never paid for and no ad campaign could replicate. More importantly, it reflects a structural decision: Chewy trains its service agents to treat every interaction as a relationship moment rather than a ticket, and gives them the authority to initiate gestures of this kind without approval.
Chewy's broader CX infrastructure supports this at scale. Its autoship subscription program — which accounts for over 75% of net sales — is built around frictionless recurring delivery with easy modification windows, so customers can adjust order frequency or pause shipments without cancellation friction. Autoship customers show significantly higher lifetime value than one-time purchasers, validating the retention logic of low-effort loyalty.
The company has also invested in 24/7 live customer support by phone, a deliberate choice in a category that has largely shifted to chat-only, staffed by agents who are trained on pet care basics so they can hold substantive conversations, not just process requests. This leads to exceptional customer service.
Chewy's NPS consistently ranks among the highest in e-commerce, and its customer retention rates have outperformed expectations in a highly competitive category crowded by Amazon and big-box retailers.
Takeaway: Loyalty isn't built in the good moments; it's built in the hard ones. Chewy has operationalized empathy at scale by giving frontline agents and support teams both the training and the authority to treat customers like people, not order numbers.
The ten companies in this guide operate in completely different industries, at completely different scales, serving completely different customers. Amazon runs one of the most complex logistics networks on earth. Chewy sends handwritten cards. Ritz-Carlton gives housekeepers $2,000 of discretionary authority. Netflix runs hundreds of simultaneous A/B tests. These aren't the same playbook — and that's the point.
What they share isn't a tactic. It's a set of structural commitments that show up differently depending on the business, but are recognizable across all of them.
Every company in this guide made deliberate architectural choices — Amazon's Working Backwards process, Delta's 150-attribute passenger profiles, Starbucks' Deep Brew AI platform — that embed CX into how the business actually operates, not just how it presents itself. CX isn't a department that gets called when something goes wrong. It's a design principle that shapes products, processes, and people's decisions from the start.
The practical question for any business: where in your organization does CX live as an input rather than a reaction?
Ritz-Carlton's $2,000 policy and Chewy's sympathy card protocol both share the same underlying logic: the person closest to the customer is best positioned to resolve the moment. Every escalation layer between the problem and the solution adds time, reduces personalization, and signals to the customer — and the employee — that trust runs upward rather than outward.
The companies that do this well pair empowerment with investment. Ritz-Carlton's new hires receive 250 hours of training in year one. Zappos puts every employee through four weeks in customer service regardless of their role. Authority without preparation is chaos; these companies understand that the two have to scale together.
Collecting customer feedback is table stakes. What separates the companies in this guide is what happens after the signal comes in. Amazon's Voice of the Customer dashboard requires documented fixes, not just acknowledgment. Netflix ships product changes only when experiments show statistically significant improvement. Delta resolves elite-tier disruptions before customers report them.
The gap between "we collect NPS" and "we act on NPS in a way customers can feel" is where most CX programs stall. Closed-loop feedback — where customers see evidence that their input changed something — is what converts measurement into trust.
Several companies in this guide invested heavily in personalization infrastructure — Delta's passenger profiles, Starbucks Rewards' individualized offers, Netflix's per-user thumbnails. But Costco built one of the highest membership renewal rates in retail by doing almost the opposite: fewer SKUs, consistent pricing, and no loyalty points to track.
Both work. What fails is the middle — a half-built personalization system that over-promises and under-delivers, or a simplified experience that mistakes friction removal for genuine value. The lesson isn't "personalize" or "simplify." It's to choose a lane and execute it without apology.
Most CX investment clusters around acquisition — the website, the onboarding, the first interaction. The companies in this guide have learned that the moments after the sale are often more important than the sale itself. Tesla's OTA updates mean the car a customer owns today is meaningfully better than the one they drove off the lot. Chewy's response to a pet's death happens long after the last purchase. Zappos' 365-day return window is most powerful precisely because most customers never use it — its existence changes how confidently they buy in the first place.
The practical implication: map your post-purchase journey with the same rigor you apply to acquisition. Where does the experience go quiet? Where does the customer have to work? Where is the first moment they feel like a number rather than a person?
None of these companies got here by adding a customer experience initiative on top of an existing operation. They built CX into the architecture — into hiring criteria, product development processes, data systems, and frontline authority structures — so that good experiences aren't the exception when someone goes above and beyond, but the expected output of how the business runs every day.
That's the shift. And it's available to any organization willing to treat customer experience as a design problem rather than a service problem.
The companies in this guide didn't achieve best-in-class CX by accident — and they didn't do it by measuring experience once a quarter and hoping the numbers moved. They built systems that capture signals in real time, route them to the right people, and close the loop fast enough that customers actually feel it.
That's exactly what AskNicely is designed to do.
AskNicely helps service businesses collect customer feedback at the moment it matters most — right after an interaction — and turns that signal into frontline coaching, performance visibility, and closed-loop follow-up that doesn't rely on a manager remembering to check a dashboard. Instead of NPS as a number that lives in a spreadsheet, it becomes a daily practice that frontline teams can see, act on, and take ownership of.
The result looks familiar: faster recovery times, stronger frontline engagement, and customers who feel heard rather than surveyed.
Whether you're running a 10-person service team or a distributed operation with hundreds of frontline employees, the gap between where your CX is today and where the best companies have taken it comes down to one thing: how quickly the people closest to your customers can learn and respond.
AskNicely closes that gap.
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