Digital experiences are not meeting customer expectations, according to the Customer Feedback Index (CFI) Report released by OpinionLab.
According to the report, customer experience and satisfaction scores fell in nearly all key industries in the last months of 2013. Specifically, online-only and omnichannel retail saw customer sentiment slip during the holiday shopping season. The holiday experience also fell flat for travelers as CFI scores for travel and airlines dropped during the busy December season.
“Customer experiences generally did not live up to changing consumer expectations as we exited 2013 and headed into the New Year,” Jonathan Levitt, chief marketing officer at OpinionLab, said in a press release. “The data indicates that, while there is tremendous digital innovation, new capabilities are not yet translating into happier consumers. Whether they were taking flights, booking hotel rooms, buying products, or requesting insurance quotes, customers registered poorer experiences across the board as the year came to a close.”
For retailers in particular, there are a number of possibilities as to what could have caused such a shift.
“When you add up the impact of heightened concern around security and privacy in the wake of data breaches at major retailers, combined with well-publicized challenges around the holidays in the last mile of the fulfillment chain, that helps explain why online-only and omnichannel retailers stumbled heading into 2014,” Levitt added.
Besides assigning an overall experience score by industry, the CFI Report also benchmarked core digital functions (search, information, loyalty) over the course of 2013 and identified the areas of the digital customer experiences where brands are making clear progress and highlighted the areas where performance is trending downward.
Here are some takeaways from the report:
Brands have made significant improvements in the experience they provide on their home page, as well as service and support capabilities. Basic research functions such as search and product information held steady over the course of the year.
Conversely, customer sentiment around loyalty pages [and programs] slipped 10% over the course of 2013 (from a measured 3.69 out of 5.00 to 3.30). This slide indicates that loyalty is a much more difficult concept to master in the omnichannel era, where consumers have an abundance of choices and barriers to switching are lower than ever.
The challenges and advantages of omnichannel were clearly reflected in consumers’ feedback on the performance of pure-play and omnichannel retailers in critical functional areas. Omnichannel retailers enjoyed a significant advantage when it came to both search and checkout functions based on their ability to showcase local store inventory counts within search results, as well as providing the convenience and instant gratification of store pickup options at checkout.
“The data shows that we have shifted from showrooming to webrooming,” Levitt said. “Major omnichannel retailers have adopted an arsenal of new tactics−including cross-channel price matching, smart technology, highly-informed store associates, and fulfillment flexibility−that gives them the edge on many fronts.”