Amazon, L.L. Bean Earn Highest Customer Satisfaction Scores This Holiday
By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA
ForeSee Experience Index shows Amazon had lots of successes this holiday season, but private company L.L. Bean is also experiencing a fair share of online success
According to the ForeSee Experience Index (FXI): 2013 U.S. Retail Edition, Amazon and L.L Bean earned the highest customer satisfaction scores (90 points) for the holiday season this year. Some of the other key findings include: Walmart garnered a higher mobile satisfaction score this year. While it still came in below Amazon (87), the retail giant improved last year’s score by five points, reaching 80. QVC, Costco, and O’Reilly Auto Parts garnered strong marks for contact center satisfaction, and supermarket Publix threw Apple to the curb, garnering the highest score in store satisfaction.
ForeSee CEO Larry Freed says in a Chain Store Age article, “The data shows that customer loyalty for retailers is on the decline, yet consumers are satisfied with the top retail brands and had the best experience with retailers who mastered the multichannel experience. While Amazon continues to reign supreme across multiple channels, several retailers have identified critical drivers for increased sales and have made great strides to improve the multichannel customer experience, setting themselves up for success into 2014.”
Indeed, one of these companies coming closer to Amazon’s leading web satisfaction score of 88 is LLbean.com, which earned 84 points this year. According to a CNBC news report, Internet sales have been an integral part of the company’s total sales over the past few years. Last year, the company’s fulfillment center in Freeport, ME shipped 13 million packages, including a record 127,000 on a single day. This volume is primarily driven by online sales, which the company expects will account for 75 percent of its total sales in the next decade. Last year, the company saw more sales online that it did through its catalog, and judging from the scores this year, it is succeeding in drawing people online with its lifetime guarantee and free shipping offers.
This holiday season, the company also turned to pop-up shops to spur some more retail sales and build up some hype about the brand. The company opened pop-up shops in NYC, Boston, and Natick, MA to show off its boots, which also drove a large amount of online sales as Internet savvy college students looked for boots to wear around campus throughout the winter. However, to reinforce consumer interest in traditional retailing, the company offered pop-up store customers exclusive deals on varieties and styles of boots they couldn’t purchase online.
Designing labels and tags that meet each channel’s needs.
It’s no secret, however, that Amazon had a good holiday season, which helped it come out on top in several of the ForeSee Index categories. This year on Cyber Monday, the e-retailer sold 37 million items, a 39 percent increase from its highest sales day last year. And if increasing sales aren’t enough to signal success this holiday season, a surge in Amazon Prime enrollments should also be a pretty good signal that more customers are becoming loyal “Amazonians.” Amazon Prime enrolled 11 million customers the third week of December, and the company says it even had to limit the number of new memberships to ensure that current members were “not impacted by the surge.” Given the issues with shipping this holiday season, this limit was a good step to protect the company’s relationship with its current loyal members, and could perhaps be one of the reasons it earned one of the highest customer satisfaction scores of the year.
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