Although I am a big College Football fan, I am not going to comment on Ohio State vs. Florida. Although it is time for a playoff system!
The real BCS is “Best in Customer Satisfaction”.
ForeSee Results recently published our Top 40, that is the “Holiday 2006 Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index”.
Why is Satisfaction important?
First what is Satisfaction? The simple definition is a combination of what you get and what you expect. Expectations play a major role in determining how satisfied we are with an experience. If we to a fast food restaurant our expectations our different than when we go to a 5 star restaurant. The meal may be better at the 5 star restaurants, but we may have been more satisfied with the fast food restaurant; because it did a better job of meeting and exceeding our expectations. Now that is a simple definition, but satisfaction is also a very complex structure. It is all things about the experience including the merchandise, the price, the ease of purchasing and more.
So why do we care? Isn’t it just about if they purchased? The answer to that is no! In very simple terms, where consumers have freedom of choice, they are going to do business where their needs are being met and their expectations are being met or exceeded. In other words, consumers are going to do business where they are satisfied. When we think of a multi-channel retailer, sales alone do not tell the whole story of how successful our website is. How many times do you research a product online and purchase it offline? I know I do it quite often. Also think about the typical sales cycle. I recently purchased a new HDTV. I researched online and offline before making the purchase. And I finally purchased it about 30 days after I started the process. But the experience I had on those websites at the beginning of my purchase evaluation greatly influenced where I purchased from. So a great experience today (where I am satisfied – my needs met and my expectations exceeded) can lead to a purchase in the future.
The reality is that the best performance metric, the best measurement of the success of the website in contributing to the future value of our organization is the level of satisfaction.
Who did we measure?
We chose the top 40 online retailers in online revenue as determined by Internet Retailers Top 500 guide from last spring. We collected data using FGI Research’s SmartPanel. We focused on consumers visiting the websites. And we analyzed the data using the proven methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
Who came out on top?
Netflix was number one for the second year in a row with a score of 86 (on a scale of 0 to 100), up 2.4% from last year. Amazon came in second with an impressive score of 84. They were followed closely by LLBean and QVC. The top traditional brick and mortar, multi-channel retailer was OldNavy with a score of 79, up 6.8% from last year. They also were near the top in terms of year over year improvement. The top 10 sites follow. Find the complete list here.
|
Retailer |
Holiday 2006 |
Holiday 2005 |
Year-Over-Year Change |
|
Netfix.com |
86 |
84 |
2.4% |
|
Amazon.com |
84 |
82 |
2.4% |
|
LLBean.com |
80 |
80 |
0.0% |
|
QVC.com |
80 |
80 |
0.0% |
|
Apple.com |
79 |
76 |
3.9% |
|
OldNavy.com |
79 |
74 |
6.8% |
|
Quixtar.com |
79 |
76 |
3.9% |
|
HPShopping.com |
78 |
74 |
5.4% |
|
Newegg.com |
78 |
79 |
-1.3% |
|
Barnes&Noble.com |
77 |
77 |
0.0% |
|
Dell.com |
77 |
74 |
4.1% |
|
Williams-Sonoma.com |
77 |
77 |
0.0% |
Who were the big gainers?
Somewhat surprising was the biggest year over year improvements were by traditional brick and mortar multi-channel retailers, Sears, JCPenney and OldNavy. Considering the fact that the top of the list is led by online only retailers, it is a great sign for consumers that the traditional brick and mortar retailers are making great strides forward in terms of providing a more satisfying online experience. The mutli-channel retailers have the advantage of offering more channel choice to consumers. It appears that many are ready to take advantage of that and compete strongly with their online only retailers.
|
Retailer |
Holiday 2006 |
Holiday 2005 |
Year-Over-Year Change |
|
Sears.com |
73 |
68 |
7.4% |
|
JCPenney.com |
76 |
71 |
7.0% |
|
OldNavy.com |
79 |
74 |
6.8% |
|
SonyStyle.com |
73 |
69 |
5.8% |
|
Target.com |
74 |
70 |
5.7% |
|
HPShopping.com |
78 |
74 |
5.4% |
What else did we see in the research?
More to come in upcoming posts, but here are a couple of the highlights.
- User Reviews played a major role in influencing purchases.
- Free shipping with restrictions has little impact on influencing satisfaction and customer loyalty
- 25% of the visitors reported that promotional emails were the primary reason for visiting the site. This is up from 20% a year ago. And nearly double the amount of people driven to the sites by search engines and shopping comparison sites.
Take Away Comment:Free your mind from only measuring success of your website by the dollars
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