Remember when simply offering consistently good customer experiences was enough for companies to impress and retain their clients? With customer expectations growing by the minute, and as our 2019 Luxembourg Customer Experience Excellence report shows, those days are long gone. Luxembourg's consumers are demanding more from their brand interactions — and brands that can't keep up, get left behind.

Brand vs. brand

We live in an expectation-laden world where our best experiences become reference points. You may be familiar with the phenomenon known as expectation transfer, where one brand's outstanding performance sets the benchmark for all other brands, regardless of sector. What this means is that, by offering uniquely positive customer experiences, top-performing brands set a new standard by which all other companies are measured. For example, when interacting with a bank, customers no longer compare this interaction with the experience they had with another bank. Instead, they compare it to their last great experience at their favorite restaurant or video streaming website, for instance.

In Luxembourg, we can see that the average Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) performance has risen across the board: top 10 customer champions and lower-ranking brands alike achieved higher scores over the last 12 months. While this shows Luxembourg brands are still keeping pace with escalating customer expectations, it also means that brands will need to work progressively harder just to maintain the status quo in the future.

What's the secret?

When taking a closer look at the Luxembourg CEE champions winning the battle against skyrocketing customer demands, we see that they structure their businesses around customer expectations, and more than satisfy their customers by exceeding these expectations.

Adept at competing in a world of mounting expectations, these firms pursue customer experience strategies that allow them to forge a profound and meaningful connection with their clients. They are so close to their customers that they not only anticipate their expectations, but also fulfill needs that their customers were not yet aware of.

The cream of the crop of Luxembourg's customer experience

KPMG surveyed over 1,000 customers for the second edition of our CEE report, covering nearly 80 brands across 10 sectors. Ernster claims the overall customer experience crown for the second year in a row, with Spuerkeess and Bierger-Center following hot on its heels in second and third places respectively.

As for sector performance, the financial services sector (which includes retail banks and insurance companies) remains the customer experience leader. With a CEE score of 7.53 out of 10, the sector's performance exceeds the national average by 5%. At the same time, Luxembourg's public sector saw excellent progress with the Bierger-Center and Guichet.lu topping this year's rankings. It just goes to show that Luxembourg residents consider public administrations as brands they can directly engage with.

Read the full report here.

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