When it comes to customer satisfaction, Internet stores can stick their tongues out at bricks-and-mortar shops, according to ForeSee Results’ and the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index. For the fourth quarter of 2006, customer satisfaction with bricks-and-mortar retail registered 74.4 on the 100-point satisfaction index, up 2.8% from 72.4 for the same period in 2005. The organizations use web-based and e-mail surveys randomly distributed to consumers; for e-commerce they collected 4,500 completed surveys.
Online retail, however, received one of the index’s highest ratings since ForeSee Results the university’s Ross School of Business first began its annual fourth quarter gauge in 1994. Customer satisfaction with Internet retail for Q4 2006 hit 83, up 2.5% from 81 in 2005. Put another way, companies operating e-commerce sites must be doing something right. The question is: What is it they’re doing to gauge what consumers expect from their web shopping experiences and deliver the goods?
Traditional online metrics—monthly unique visitors, page views, cart abandonment, conversion rate, average ticket, site performance and others—are easy to measure and helpful, and e-retailers always will need them at hand, says Larry S. Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, a research firm that specializes in online customer satisfaction.
“But there’s a huge void within these measurements—they cannot tell you customers’ perceptions, expectations and intentions,” Freed says. “And to be successful, an e-commerce site must understand the intentions of its customers.” It’s the combination of traditional metrics with intention, attitude and expectation metrics, Freed says, that can show e-retailers what their customers want in an e-commerce site experience.
From conducting web-based or e-mail surveys to using predictive behavioral testing and targeting to culling social networking content to sequencing consumers’ visual DNA, some e-retailers have begun using the latest technology to give consumers what they want online. And they’re leaning heavily on technology because with the quickly changing and ever-evolving nature of the Internet and the maturation of e-commerce, they must to be competitive, experts say.
To truly succeed, e-retailers must use technology to gather and delve into all possible information and learn to uncover and track trends before they pick up steam, says Rob Harles, senior vice president of marketing solutions at comScore Networks Inc., a research firm specializing in consumer behavior. “E-retailers must anticipate customer desires,” he says. “For instance, understanding things like Bluray vs. HD-DVD: Read the chatter online and find the key influencers and you can build a plan ahead of time.”
Because of the explosive growth of online “chatter,” consumer-generated content like social networking and product reviews, there is much more pressure on marketers to get results, says Philippe Suchet, CEO of Kefta Inc., a vendor of technology that profiles individual online consumers. “Most analytics today work from a web page-centric angle,” he says, “when what e-retailers most need today is a customer-centric view.”
In the grand scheme of things it’s very difficult to determine what consumers like based on traditional web analytics data, says Alex Willcock, founder of Imagini Holdings Ltd., an online consumer research and technology development firm. Microsoft Corp.’s MSN network is using Imagini’s Visual DNA technology to better understand network users and their motivations for being there—via consumer testing with images not words—and implement findings in an attempt to ensure the right users are getting the right message in ads and content.
“Conventional analytics basically just tell you the areas people visited on the site,” Willcock contends. “They don’t tell you a person’s style.”
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