Customer Service: Attention to e-tail

Taken from Retail Week - February 2009

Retailers’ websites are increasingly offering consumers advice before they buy. But how good are retailers at replicating in-store product advice online?

When you want to choose a product to buy on a website and the product description doesn’t answer all your questions, where do you turn? Retail Week tested the product information and customer service tools available on eight popular sites to see whether they could transform undecided shoppers into converted customers.

The results show that some retailers are putting a huge amount of time and effort into creating content to help customers make informed purchasing decisions. Others have implemented more interactive systems, with mixed results.

However, in the case of the highest scoring retailers we discovered that it’s now possible to get as good, if not better, product advice online than you would get in many stores.

Highlights from the research involved in this report include a sensible discussion via instant messaging with a customer services assistant at Comet and a much less sensible discussion – if you can call it that – with an automated agent on Ikea’s website.

Another interesting area was retailers’ responses to emails. Despite the industry’s reputation for not serving customers very well this way, retailers provided helpful and timely responses.

Click here to read the rest of the article, and see how Retail Week scored Boots, Comet, Figleaves, Net-A-Porter, Ikea, Mothercare, DIY.com and Tesco Direct for their customer service tools.

Posted February 25th, 2009 by acansick | In category Online