Best Customer Service 2025: The Winning Strategies

A car drives into a Discount Tire location flappety-flap-flapping with a blowout. The car’s owner asks the counter service folks for a fix. While inspecting the car, technicians discover another tire is on the verge of failing catastrophically—but the owner is in dire straits and can't afford the replacement.

Sometimes, they might drive off with a new tire anyway.

"We don't let them leave if they're unsafe," says Tom Williams, Discount Tire’s Chief Experience Officer, who started as a tire changer 38 years ago. "Our employees, they're empowered to go up to putting a set of tires on a car at no cost. They don't have to call someone."

This distinct focus on customer needs earned Discount Tire its No. 6 ranking on Forbes’ newest Best Customer Service 2025 list, and the top spot in its industry. Led once again by The UPS Store, the list's top spots include an insurance agency (USAA at No. 2), two restaurants (Chick-fil-A at No. 3 and Mission BBQ at No. 7), a tire store (Discount Tire) two grocery stores (Trader Joe's, No. 5 and Publix, No. 9), an outdoor outfitter (REI, No. 4), a convenience store (Buc-ee's, No. 10) and a diabetes monitoring company (Dexcom, No. 8).

This second annual Forbes list was created in partnership with data and analytics company HundredX, whose 12-month survey asked 181,000 people in the United States to describe their interactions with more than 3,500 products and brands. HundredX founder and CEO Rob Pace says customers’ answers this year to future buying-intention questions suggest they are 4.4 percent more likely, versus their peers, to do future business with companies in this year’s top 100.

“If you look at the top 25 names, it's 8.3 percent,” Pace says. “People often think of customer service as a cost. But no, it is directly correlated to loyalty, and has an ROI associated with it.”

Indeed, at The UPS Store, which has topped the list two years in a row, the store has focused on speeding up routine interactions, says president Sarah Casalan. Self-serve kiosks now allow people who prefer lickety-split transactions to simply scan a QR code, drop their package or unboxed return item, and leave.

"Some people want that white-glove, high-touch experience, and we'll give that to them at the counter," Casalan says, noting that about 75 percent of eligible customers still opt for human interaction. But "if you just want to self-serve, you're in and out."

The time saved by those quick transactions adds up to better service for both groups, she says, since associates have more time to spend on complex jobs or interacting with favorite local customers. Svelte new store designs streamline the process by tucking supplies and other retail items out of the way to create clear avenues to both self-service and customer service.

That attention to both assisted self-service and high-touch interaction is the dominant trend in customer service, says Jason Maynard, chief technology officer for North America and Asia-Pacific at Zendesk, which runs one of the world's largest customer service platforms. Whereas companies once deliberately impeded the route to service to avoid overload and costs, Zendesk’s surveys of 60,000 firms and their customers finds a major shift to chatbots and AI increasingly handling the mundane part of the load.

"The answers are available 24-7, they can speak any language, any dialect, they can give you your answer in a Danish haiku in a matter of seconds," Maynard says. By automating simple "tier 1" support for things like address changes or refunds, companies free up resources to direct to more complex customer needs.

But as the companies on this year’s list reveal, there’s more than one way to boost customer service. Take Discount Tire's Treadwell system, for example, which allows customers and employees to select the best tire for a given car based on the customer’s location and driving habits, using real-world driving and tire data from the company's nationwide network of stores to identify picks for value, performance and local favorites. Meanwhile, at Buc-ee's, all corporate employees directly experience the customer service delivered by in-store staff—by working those jobs for two days each year.

"I've been a cashier. I've done every single job other than work in the car wash—that's on my roadmap to do in 2025," says Jeff Nadalo, Buc-ee's general counsel and spokesperson. "That experience, you instill that view all throughout the company, not just at the store level, but in the corporate world, that we're really serving our customers."

At Trader Joe's (No. 5), one part of customer service is keeping all stores fully staffed at all times. Employees—in Trader Joe vernacular, “captains,” “mates” and "crew"—are typically well-paid and rotate between jobs during a shift, so they rarely have to spend an entire day stocking shelves or bagging groceries. When an extra register must open or bagging needs spike, a bell rings and employees shift responsibilities immediately.

"We have a lot of customers, and there's a lot going on in our stores at any given time, but it's that energy that makes the job fun," Trader Joe's President and Vice-CEO Jon Basalone says. "I'm always looking to see, is there more than one person shopping together? That means somebody said, 'Hey, I'm going to Trader Joe's,' and the other person said, 'I'll go with you.' "

METHODOLOGY

Forbes partnered with data analytics company HundredX to create Best Customer Service 2025. A yearlong survey of 181,000 people in the United States provided 4.4 million ratings of more than 3,500 brands, where companies were evaluated on four factors: personal interaction, speed, services and resolution. The questions were tailored to different industries—restaurants were rated on taste, for example, while retailers were rated on returns—and companies were compared both overall and to their competitors. At least 400 reviews were required for eligibility, and the top 300 made the list.

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As with all Forbes lists, companies pay no fee to participate. For questions about this list, please contact listdesk (at) forbes.com.