BlueNile.com, No.49 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, ContainerStore.com, No. 288, and Crutchfield.com, No. 89, were among the 11 sites receiving a top rating in customer service in The E-Tailing Group’s 10th Annual Mystery Shopping Study of 100 e-commerce sites. Rounding out the group were DiscoveryStore.com, Fossil.com, Golfsmith.com, Landsend.com, Polo.com, PotteryBarn.com, REI.com and Zappos.com.
Through this year’s study we clearly saw a divide between merchants that just provide baseline service and those that truly have a customer service culture, Says Lauren Freedman, The E-Tailing Group president. Great service leads to loyalty, and those merchants who make it the differentiator will profit from their investments.
To qualify as a top-performing merchant, each site had to have in place all 12 of the customer service features that the researchers looked for. Those features include a toll-free telephone number displayed on the home page and keyword search functionality. Retailers also had to correctly answer e-mail questions within 25 hours, deliver packages within a minimum of four days of an order, require six or fewer clicks to complete checkout, and provide real-time inventory status in the shopping cart or on a product page.
Top-rated sites also had to display shipping status, and order confirmation in the shopping cart. They also had to supply e-mail order confirmation, display recommend products during the shopping process, display customer service hours and show holiday shopping deadlines.
Four additional sites would have achieved top-rated status but for the lack of one feature: their toll-free numbers were not clearly visible on the home page. This is a perfect example of a simple-to-execute customer-centric feature that builds trust and decreases site abandonment, Freedman says.
In its tenth year, the annual review is finding some customer service metrics are becoming standard while some newer ones merit such consideration by merchants. Among site features defined in the study as empowering customers to shop and mange their purchases efficiently, 83% of sites had comprehensive FAQs, up from 74% in the 2006 study. Newer features such as back-in-stock alerts, offered by 7% of merchants, might save a sale, Freedman says.
Convenience in the cart and confirmation processes gained as 72% of the merchants surveyed offered a perpetual cart displaying a running total as visitors shop, a gain from the 55% who did so in the previous study. 74% of the merchants now display pictures of the chosen items in the cart, which helps recall, Freedman notes. The study found timely post-order communication almost universal, with 95% of those reviewed providing immediate order confirmation on-site, a slight dip from the previous year’s 100%, and 95% providing e-mailed shipping confirmation, up from 88% last year.
Technology and services supporting customer service were up, with 32% of the sites offering live help versus 29% the previous year; and 87% of call center agents answering questions correctly, versus 75% in 2006. Click-to-call functionality, though still relatively rare, grew dramatically to 16% of the sites reviewed versus only 3% the previous year.
Alternative payment methods, though growing, still aren’t widespread. Deferred payment is an option on 37% of the sites versus 35% the previous year. The number of sites offering Google Checkout grew to 12% from 7% in the previous study. PayPal, which was not tracked previously, was an option on 22% of the sites reviewed in the latest study.