Movie rental site Netflix and home shopping portal QVC.com are, along with perennial winner Amazon.com, the current kings of online customer satisfaction, according to the ForeSee Results Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index.
The report, issued twice a year, surveys more than 20,000 consumers who visited the top 100 retail Web sites and checks their experiences according to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index.
Netflix.com and QVC.com lead the satisfaction pack this time out with high scores of 85 points out of a possible 100. Other customer favorite sites included Amazon.com (83 points), the Web site for bookseller Barnes & Noble (82), pet supplier DrsFosterSmith.com (81), outdoor gear seller LLBean.com (79) and Apple.com (79).
At the other end of the top 100, the leading retailers with the most room for improvement include PCMall.com and PCConnection.com, each with 67 out of 100 possible satisfaction points. Home Depot’s Web site came in with 69 points, while Lowes.com received 70 points and BestBuy.com got 71.
The index tracks scores both from customers who buy from a top 100 retail site and those who simply browse those sites.
“It’s impressive that some retailers’ satisfaction scores for browsers are so high,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, in a statement. “We expect purchaser satisfaction with the leaders to be high, but high browser satisfaction scores represent the strong positive contribution of the online shopping experience that has been difficult to quantify through other metrics.
The index focuses on four broad areas of consumer satisfaction: price, merchandise, brand and site experience. The ForeSee report indicates that simply cutting prices won’t create loyal customers or improve retailers’ bottom line without attention to the Web experience part of the equation.
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