Retailers Struggled to Serve Customers over Xmas

According to new data from Jupiter Media Metrix, both brick-and-mortar and online-only retailers have struggled to respond to customer service e-mails quickly this holiday season.

Data from the December 2001 Jupiter Customer Service WebTrack shows that just 30% of all retailers tracked resolved basic customer service requests online within six hours. While this is a slight improvement over last quarter's 27%, the advice to retailers is to concentrate on retaining customers acquired during the holiday season by reaching out to those that bore the brunt of slow response.

According to David Daniels, senior analyst at Jupiter, 'Santa might be relaxing now, but retailers can't. The implications of unsatisfying online service remain particularly harsh. These are peak return and customer service weeks for retailers to focus on retaining holiday shopping customers. Retailers must scrutinize online customer service response times, contact centre service levels and staffing resources.'

Jupiter's WebTrack data indicate that while a greater percentage of online-only retailers (33%) responded to customer service e-mails within six hours than brick-and-mortar retailers (28%) did, online-only retailers were less responsive overall. According to the WebTrack, 40% of online-only retailers took more than three days to respond or did not respond to e-mails at all, compared with 28% of brick-and-mortar retailers in the same category.

This finding is important given that a majority of consumers (57%) polled in a November 2001 Jupiter Consumer Survey said that the speed of a retailer's response to customer service e-mail inquiries would affect their decision to make future purchases from the particular website. Jupiter analysts also found that the impact of poor customer service online cascades across channels.

According to the same survey, 53% of consumers said they would be less likely to buy again from a retailer's off-line store if they had an unsatisfying experience with the online store. Only a mere three percent of consumers surveyed indicated that online service would not affect their future purchases or that they would continue to buy from the merchant regardless of price.

Daniels added 'It's time for retailers to focus on the basics and invest in critical e-mail customer service automation systems. A recent Jupiter Executive Survey found that only 43% of websites have an e-mail automation system. This in part explains this season's lacklustre online customer service performance'.

In December 2001, Jupiter systematically scoured and measured the websites of 250 leading companies in the automobile, business-to-business, consumer packaged goods, finance, health, music, retail and travel industries. The sites were selected based on a mix of Jupiter's judgment of the most important and representative websites in each space, and the Media Metrix 100 most popular sites for October 2001.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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