Online shopping now accounts for a greater amount of consumer spend than brick-and-mortar sales. And Amazon continues to disrupt retail on a variety of fronts. So you would think that would light a fire beneath retailers of all stripes, right? Well, if you thought that, you would be wrong.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index yesterday reported that the national level of customer satisfaction fell in the second quarter of this year. That’s the first drop on this front since the fourth quarter of 2015, says ACSI.
Meanwhile Forrester’s 2017 Customer Experience Index survey results suggest that traditional U.S. retailers have not improved their customer experience since last year. The average customer experience delivered by the brands Forrester considered were down slightly. The CX score of 20 retailers declined while 15 increased.
PetSmart was rated by survey participants as the No. 1 traditional retailer in 2017, Forrester days. The good news is that’s up from fifth place last year. The bad news is that the company’s CX Index score did not increase. Pharmacy Rite Aid was the only company with a significant CX quality increase, Forrester says.
That’s a shame, because Forrester says 91 percent of customers who feel valued stay with the brand and 89 percent plan to spend more. “This proves that emotion affects retailers' bottom line: a one-point improvement in a CX Index score can lead to an incremental $244 million in revenue for big-box retailers,” says the Forrester index, which surveyed nearly 120,000 U.S. online adult consumers.
Speaking of online, ACSI ranks Amazon as the No. 1 internet retailer in terms of customer satisfaction. Amazon is also the world’s largest online retailer and
the world’s third largest retailer – with only Walmart and CVS ahead of it.