According to the “American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI): Retail and Ecommerce report”, Ecommerce customer satisfaction is the lowest it has been in the last 13 years.
Around 70,000 customers were interviewed by University of Michigan and its research partners throughout 2013. According to the findings, customer satisfaction fell to its lowest point ever in the past 13 years. The online retail satisfaction score dropped by 4.9% overall, resulting in a 78 point score in 2013, down from 82 in 2012. Internet retail giant Amazon, along with media streaming service Netflix were the only ones who's score increased in 2013, with all other channels showing a decrease in customer satisfaction.
Holiday issues, such as parcel delivery delays and sites crashing due to high traffic were just some of the complaints. Oddly enough, overall scores for online shopping experiences was high, with ease of checkout, product variety, and overall site performance coming in with the highest scores. No questions regarding mobile shopping experiences were asked.
ACSI mentioned in the report the reason online merchants should take note on these issues, as these scores are meant to help with predicting future market performance and success.
“ACSI data have proven to be strongly related to a number of essential indicators of micro and macroeconomic performance. For example, firms with higher levels of customer satisfaction tend to have higher earnings and stock returns relative to competitors. Stock portfolios based on companies that show strong performance in ACSI deliver excess returns in up markets as well as down markets. And, at the macro level, customer satisfaction has been shown to be predictive of both consumer spending and GDP growth,” stated the report.
