John Lewis beats M&S and Ocado to be top of the shops for customer satisfaction

Waitrose and Greggs saw customer satisfaction levels fall significantly

John Lewis has been named as the nation’s favourite retail store, beating a string of other major businesses to take the top spot for customer satisfaction.

The UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) received almost 60,000 responses from customers, including retail, banking, services, utilities, telecommunications and more, with a score then assigned to each brand.

John Lewis edged out Marks & Spencer to take the top spot among retail outlets, with Holland & Barrett, Ocado and Amazon also among the best-ranked.

Waitrose was the only food retail firm to see its score fall by more than one point compared to last year, though it remains above the sector average. Having ranked fourth overall a year ago, the shop sits 26th this time around. The report also noted its sales grew in the quarter-year to May by below the market average.

In banking, the most notable highlight was seeing smaller, digital or challenger brands beat off competition from most of the main established high street names.

First Direct, which is owned by HSBC and has around 1.5 million customers, was the top-rated brand overall – having been 14th a year ago – and finished just above Starling Bank in the banks and building societies category.

Nationwide Building Society was the only legacy name to feature in the top 30 brands, with Monzo and The Co-Operative Bank also ranking ahead of the likes of Santander and Barclays.

Paypal and Klarna also both featured in the index for the first time and were ranked among the top 10 organisations overall, but as financial tools and payments firms are categorised in the services sector rather than among the banks.

The report further broke down customer satisfaction reports into categories including experience, complaint handling, customer ethos, emotional connection and ethics. Across these subjective scores, UKCSI said M&S food was “among the highest-rated on all five dimensions”, with First Direct, John Lewis, Starling and Nationwide noted as highly ranked across four of the five.

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For those ranking outside the top 50 firms overall, the report also highlighted a number of most-improved businesses from their 2024 to 2025 scores.

Car manufacturer Seat saw the highest individual increase, with the likes of transport firms Thameslink and TransPennine Express both seeing improvements, yet still trailing their sector average.

Among the top-50 ranked companies, the only ones to see their customer satisfaction levels drop aside from Waitrose were holiday firm Jet2, service retailer Timpson and high street bakery firm Greggs.