Customer satisfaction was one of the hot topics at the eTail 2004 conference in Palm Springs, CA, this week. Ken Seiff, CEO of Bluefly Inc., told his audience at the Customer Satisfaction: What Does It Really Mean? session that his eyes were opened when the company began surveying customers about their attitudes toward Bluefly.
In 2000, Bluefly segmented its 130,000 customers and identified 4% as their best, most highly profitable customers. Those 4% contributed 49% of the company’s margin. It followed up with surveys to 30,000 customers, then in 2001, conducted five focus groups.
What Bluefly learned was disappointing. “We found that for those customers who were so important to us, we weren’t important to them,” Seiff said. In fact, the message the company got was, “Thanks for sending us the e-mails. They remind us that you exist,” Seiff said. “We weren’t top of mind for them. They weren’t apostles for us.”
Further, the best customers were not aware of the functionality of the site.
Bluefly undertook an initiative to improve customer satisfaction. That included building the site around how the best customers behaved on the site, monitoring customer service feedback to learn what was on customers’ minds and employing ForeSee Results Inc.’s methodology to measure customer satisfaction and as a guide for areas to improve.
Within a year, the proportion of highly profitable customers increased from 4% to 13% and their contribution to margin increased 50%.
Further surveying also revealed other surprises, Seiff said. “Customers were not focused on the same things we were focused on,” he said. “They were not necessarily focused on the products and the process, the way we were.” For instance, the company received a lot of feedback from how purchases were packaged. When the items arrived in a shopping bag, one customer wrote in to say how good it made her feel, as if she had just returned from a shopping trip to a high-end department store. Another wrote to say that when her order arrived packaged so nicely, she felt as if she had given herself a gift. “All of a sudden, I realized that what we were selling was much greater than the actual product,” Seiff said.
The exercise in tracking customer satisfaction has changed how Bluefly operates, Seiff said. “Businesses rarely think beyond the products and services in the environment they can control,” he said. “We began thinking about the softer, subtler aspects of the experience.”
As a result, he said, “the vocabulary of the company has changed. The customer and the experience are key phrases in our internal discussions.”
Similarly, dance and exercise clothing manufacturer Danskin Inc. redesigned its web site in response to what it learned by surveying using ForeSee Results. “Existing customers were pretty satisfied, but first-time users were confused,” said Joyce Darkey, Danskin’s vice president of marketing. Danskin.com earned a customer satisfaction score of 62 of 100.
As a result of the survey, Danskin replaced its line drawings with photos and its barebones product descriptions, which were the same descriptions that Danskin used in its wholesale catalog pressed into double duty online, with fuller descriptions. It also added information on how to measure oneself to ensure the right size and fit and information about different styles of stretch clothing. It also added product search. Customer satisfaction surveyed eight months after the changes rose to 73, Darkey reported.
“If your conversion rate is 5%, which would be phenomenal, that still means that 95% aren’t buying,” Darkey said. “Don’t you want to know what they are thinking?” Darkey and Eric Nadler, vice president of sales administration, spoke at a session titled “Best Practices for Creating a Seven Figure Web Site on a Shoestring Budget.”
“As the e-retail marketplace matures, customer satisfaction will be an important factor in its success,” says Paul Leroux, CTO of Gomez Inc., web site performance monitoring company, who participated in the panel discussion “Defining Success in 2004 and Beyond.” “Retailers are realizing that they have to tend to customer satisfaction as aggressively online as they do offline.”
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