E-commerce topped the Service Industry with its significant increase in terms of customer satisfaction. Companies in lined with e-commerce reached 81.6 record score based on University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). This score had increased by 2% compared when with the same time last year.
According to University of Michigan, e-commerce business sector took the top spot against the other form of industries in terms of customer satisfaction during last year’s fourth quarter.
E-commerce’s improvement and impressive performance is exceptional considering national ACSI’s usual downward trend as stated by the head of UM index, Claes Fornell. In fact, e-commerce is the only sector that showed improvement in this quarter with consistent customer satisfaction. This is rather impressive because other industries are experiencing some difficulty.
On a macro-overview, ACSI consists of above 200 companies within more than 40 different industries. The entire picture shows that the ACSI went down by 0.4% to 74.9 during the 4th quarter – a decline that involved two consecutive quarters.
The performance of e-commerce was a breakthrough. The score for the category, online retail, was the highest at 83. Online retailers overtook the collective score of the offline retailers which is 74.2. Moreover, all measured companies in the e-business industry had been included among the top 10 companies with the highest scores.
The highest scorer for the quarter in the e-commerce sector was Amazon.com which got a score of 88. Newegg closely followed Amazon.com with 87 and Netflix with a score of 84. Amazon.com had been recognized as the second highest scorer in the ACSI following Heinz for the whole year of 2007.
This quarter, the university merged online retail and online auction category due to the rising overlap of these two as well as the tight competition between them. Ebay, with a score of 81, increased by only 1 point from last year and had remained quite stagnant over the last few years. However since 2004, Amazon.com had rolled its score up by 5% due to its consistent innovations.
The only category in the e-commerce sector that needs more improvement and innovation is the travel industry online. This particular category went down 1.3% to 75 during the 4th quarter as compared to last year. There had also been a drop in the level of satisfaction among its customers online.
Online brokerages had increased 1.3% from last year to 79. The highest scorer was Fidelity which increased by 5% to 84.
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Nathan Fleming
February 25th, 2008Yes, it is indeed true that i see a lot more difference in customer service in e-commerce than the regular brick and mortar companies. I get the responses very fast and promptly. I have had many situations where even if i had brought something offline, i tended to register my complaint online to get prompt response from them rather than going there and registering. Internet has truly changed things.
Christopher
February 25th, 2008Once I had a very big issue with a very big online shopping portal (don’t want to eloborate much on this due to various issues). I just sent an email about this issue to the customer service personnel. To my surprise, the next day they have sent a representative of the site to my house to help me out of this situation. Which i really appreciated for the way they respect the customer!