The retailer tested the site with and without the badge to prove its worth.

Baby gear and apparel retailer BabyAge.com knows it is especially important to offer great customer service because it caters to busy on-the-go moms and dads—a group of consumers who can be easily turned off by bad customer service.  

The e-retailer’s mission was put to the test last year when customer service ratings company StellaService mystery shopped the site, measuring 300 customer service metrics, from the speed of refund processing to customer service support. BabyAge.com passed the test, nabbing a StellaService seal that has proven to help boost conversions by 8.6%.

“The StellaService message made sense to our team from the beginning,” says Ryan Urban, BabyAge.com’s chief revenue officer. “It’s a creditable message about our service performance from an independent source.”

To test that notion, BabyAge.com ran a split A/B test to better understand the impact of the seal at key decision-making points throughout the shopping process. BabyAge gathered data from 67,000 site visitors and found that the version of the site with the seal achieved an 8.6% higher conversion rate than the version without the seal.

BabyAge purposefully places the badge, which is free to display, where shoppers will likely see it, for example, at the top of product pages. The seal says “StellaService: Excellent” with text underneath that reads: “The web’s most trusted signal of high quality customer service.”

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StellaService says it assesses more than 4,000 large e-retailers without their knowledge on numerous specific customer service metrics. “Not only can we tell you which retailers ship with a return label, we can tell you which of those retailers ship a return label with an adhesive,” a StellaService spokesman says.

“We are proud of our rating from StellaService,” says Jack Kiefer, CEO of BabyAge.  “It gives us a way to tell all of our shoppers how hard we are working for them each day.”

Not all sites get such high marks as BabyAge when it comes to customer service. A quarter of e-retailers in a recent survey by StellaService failed to respond to consumer questions posted on the retailers’ Facebook walls and also within the comments section of a merchant’s own posts, according to a new report from StellaService. The customer service vendor arrived at its finding by posing general questions to 20 retailers on the social network.

In November, StellaService raised $5 million in a funding round. It used the capital to hire employees, develop products and expand its business.

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