Etailers must up their game in customer care

4 September 2008

“The online sites of high street retailers are much better at delivering customer service”

The retail team at FreshMinds has recently completed an analysis of customer support strategies of the top ten UK online retailers. The research benchmarked the retailers on key criteria to identify the best performers.

In the past, being cheap compensated for poor, or no, customer support when buying online. But today shoppers can find identical products on the high street for the same or even less money.

We identified three fundamental components of good customer support in the online environment: integration with the overall offer, accessibility and problem resolution. Shoppers will trust in the offer only when all these elements are seamlessly in place. A major factor is that more high street players have entered the online retail marketplace and they’ve raised the expectations of the quality level of customer support. Our research concluded that the online sites of high street retailers Argos, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Tesco are much better at delivering customer service: in our final analysis, only one of the top five retailers is an online-only retailer and its average score was 2.4 compared to 3.5 for the bricks-and-clicks providers.

Online shoppers have come to expect good service wherever they shop. So online retailers need their customer service to be integrated within their overall offer. But we found high street retailers are way out ahead. They took the top three positions. Average scores for high street were 3.7 compared to 2.2 for pure-plays.

In another example, for part of our investigations into accessibility, we put customer service telephone lines and email enquiries to the test. The average time a high street retailer took to respond to an email enquiry was 8 hours 54 minutes; it was over 30 hours for pure-plays. The average time spent on the phone on hold was 77 seconds for the online outlet of a high street retailer but 109 seconds for a pure-play.

Problem solving painted the same picture. With the exception of Amazon, the internet-only retailers disappointed by offering limited guarantees and little help - one site in the top ten didn’t offer refunds at all. Here the average score for pure-plays was 2.5 compared to the high street’s 3.2. Without a physical store, online retailers should work harder.

In an uncertain economic climate, customer support offers a reassuring safety net. As consumers control their expenditure, customer support is not only fundamental to the success of online retailers, it’s a competitive advantage. While high street brands have the know-how to deliver effective customer support, the online retailers, with a very few exceptions, have a long way to go.

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