The level of customer service at US online stores has improved considerably in the past year, according to the research carried out by the e-tailing group.
The Chicago based consulting firm secretly shopped at 100 e-commerce sites during the fourth quarter of 2002 to assess the state of online customer service. It concentrated on a number of criteria including email response time, clicks to checkout, order confirmations, inventory status and delivery time and was largely encouraged by the findings.
“The evolution of e-commerce was quite apparent in our 4th quarter 2002 Mystery Shopping Study,” said Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group. “Overall, merchants were focused on better editing and execution of core customer service functionality.”
The study revealed a significant fall in email response time, from 21.1 hours in the final quarter of 2001 to 18.7 hours in the same period in 2002. Shopping time was also down from 5.3 minutes to 4.1 minutes and improvements in efficiency were also reflected by the fact that clicks to checkout averaged 4.93 in the 2002 holiday season as opposed to 5.36 last time round. The only disappointment was the time it took for orders to arrive. Average delivery times increased from 3.8 business days to 4.4 business days over the year.
Online shopping is becoming more popular all the time and according to research from Yahoo! and ACNielsen, US consumers spent a total of $15.5 billion over the internet during Q4 2002 (see US Online Retail Spend To Nudge Up 1.4% In Q1, Finds Survey).
