Amazon and Dell Top UK Online Retail Customer Experience

Blast Radius, a UK customer experience consultancy, has conducted and publicized a customer experience audit of the top 28 (by traffic) online British retailers. What I like about their customer experience evaluation is that it includes the entire customer experience, not just the buying experience--but the entire end-to-end experience.

We used to run similar customer experience tests for online retailers in the U.S., until the results began to get fairly equal.

Here are the top 10:
The top ten:

1. Amazon UK
2. Dell EMEA
3. Apple Computer UK
4. Next
5. Comet
6. Tesco/QVC UK [tied]
7. Currys/Littlewoods [tied]
8. Asos
9. John Lewis
10. Hewlett-Packard/Marks and Spencer [tied]

You can download the entire Blast Radius Report on UK Online Shopping 2006.

What caught my attention about this customer experience comparison were three things. First, that the U.S. based companies (Amazon, Dell, Amazon) seemed to do better than the UK brands, such as Tesco, Comet and the venerable Marks and Spencer. Second, that Dell came out ahead of  HP on this trial. In the U.S., HP has been giving Dell a real run for the money in customer experience. Third, that the areas in which the UK e-tailers fall short were returns handling and delivery scheduling.

In the press release that accompanied the study, Lee Feldman, Blast Radius' Chief Creative Officer, commented:

“The study results show that investment by online retailers tends to focus on what they care about most, securing the sale.  This attention is at odds with what the customers focus on, what happens after they have made a purchase.  This `service disconnect` is critical and reveals a short sighted view of the customer based on immediate revenue collection where real value is gained from long-term relationships."

The study cited these issues as negative differentiators:

• Return policies not stated up front
• Inability to schedule deliveries at convenient times and slow deliveries/product unavailability (after the order is placed)
• Anonymous (non-branded) packaging vs. branded packaging, branded inserts, good branded email follow ups

Comments

[John Ounpuu]

Patty,

FYI Blast Radius also published a report looking at Online Shopping in the US. This was the second year for the US report and the first year for the UK version. Full disclosure: I work for Blast Radius and was involved in putting the US report together. Both can be downloaded at Blastradius.com. No forms to jump through, just straight links to the PDFs.

[Patty Seybold]

Graham--
Thanks for keeping me honest.. Of course I don't think that only the online experience is important. That's why I like Tesco, for example.. they offer a full service, and track your purchases, and try to streamline in the areas that matter most to customers in each neighborhood, and they also offer good online service. It's much harder to do a good job with multi-channel and cross-lifecycle customer experience than it is with online only.. you're right.. But what I liked about this particular online retail study (and what we also did when we used to do these) is that it included the end-to-end online experience, including the experience of calling to check on order status when required (already a strike against you).. and the experience of returning the product, not just purchasing it..

[Daniel Scocco]

I think Amazon deserves the first place. Despite the current situation the company is always trying to improve the customer experience, often through innovative ideas and platforms.

[GrahamHill]

Patty

The report and (others like it), that only look at the online shopping experience are misleading.

Customers are by nature multi-channel beasts. As a recent McKinsey Quarterly article showed, customers use many different channels, for different purposes at different times, depending upon their situation. It is the summation of their experiences across all these (mostly off-line) channels and touchpoints that constitute the total customer experience.

And customers conversations are mostly off-line too. As recent Keller Fay research showed, over 90% of customer conversations are still held off-line, rather than on-line. Word of mouth from peers adds reinforcement to customer' own perceptions of the the total customer experience.

Just looking at the online sales experience is misleading. It is interesting, but it is no where near enough.

Graham Hill