Answers™ Experience Index (AXI): 2014 U.S. Retail Report Finds Amazon Loses Its Unequaled Lead
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Annual Report Measures Holiday Customer Satisfaction and Shopper Trends For Retail Touch Points
Answers Corporation, a provider of cloud-based voice of customer solutions and owner of the Internet brand Answers.com, has released of The AnswersTM Experience Index (AXI): 2014 U.S. Retail Edition, which examines retailer’s most important customer touch points: retail chain stores, e-commerce websites, and mobile experiences. The study included more than 40,000 consumer surveys gathered for the top 100 retail websites, top 30 retail chain stores and top 30 mobile experiences between October 26 and December 15, 2014, according to a press release.
One of the chief findings of the study is that shopper satisfaction is a clear factor in future engagement such as purchase, loyalty, and spreading positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
Ultimately, the study found that overall customer satisfaction scored fell for retail chain stores and e-commerce websites compared to last year, while scores for mobile sites and apps remained static, driven largely by a rising tide of customer expectations. The study revealed that the modern shopper is deeply multichannel, and multi-device driven, performing research across channels, and doing price comparisons online and in-store. They are also looking for deeper discounts earlier in the holiday shopping season, with increased expectations of great deals.
The study found that the average customer satisfaction score for retail websites fell two points from 79 to 77, and that Amazon lost its title as undisputed king of online customer satisfaction, not only in the retail website category, but also in the mobile one, slipping five points this year to a score of 83.
“It’s a watershed year for U.S. holiday retail, starting with Amazon’s dramatic drop in customer satisfaction,” Jim Yang, Senior Vice President of Products, Marketing and Services for Answers Cloud Services, asserted in the press release.
“This year’s AXI data demonstrates the difficulty of staying ahead in an increasingly complex multichannel shopping world. It’s not that Amazon is no longer exceptional, because it clearly is. Rather, Amazon’s inability to deliver adequately against its customers’ expectations, particularly when it comes to product pricing, has opened the door for other retail brands this year. In the face of savvier consumers, retailers have to take a more disciplined approach to monitoring and improving customer satisfaction or else find themselves struggling to remain relevant.”
The study also found the customers are mobilizing, especially when it comes to researching purchases and making transactions, with customer satisfaction with mobile shopping experiences overall holding steady at 79 in 2014. But mobile payments are not quite ready for takeoff, with more than 60 percent of shoppers unwilling to use a mobile payment service like Google Wallet or Apple Pay to purchase items in a store.
And despite the predictions that e-commerce would kill brick-and-mortar retail, the evidence demonstrates that in-store purchases still account for the vast majority of retail transactions. Physical storefronts are actually enabling omnichannel consumption by leveraging innovations like “buy online/pick-up in store” and in-store mobile checkouts.
However, in-store experience satisfaction fell, dropping a point to 78 in 2014, and the study showed that the most important investment priority for retail chain stores is to improve their merchandise (appeal, variety and availability of product) as 72 percent of the retailers measured had merchandise as the most powerful satisfaction driver for their consumers.