Home Depot, Zappos, Office Depot among online customer service leaders

Chicago – One pure-play and six omnichannel retailers received top honors for their online customer service in the E-Tailing Group’s Q4 2014 Mystery Shopping Study. In alphabetical order, the top performers were Dick’s Sporting Goods, Kate Spade, Office Depot, Ross-Simons, The Home Depot, Williams-Sonoma, and Zappos.



Top performers were graded on aspects of their online customer service including accessibility of an 800 number on their site, overall customer service destination page score, three or fewer days to receive a package, five or fewer clocks to check out, ability to move an item from a cart to a saved list, overall customer service experience, and answers to email questions within 24 hours with personalized salutation and content.



Looking at overall performance of the 100 retailers benchmarked, access ranges from finding information via self-service tools starts with FAQs now present only on 83%, where the ability to search these databases has increased to 26 sites from 20 in 2013. Customer service hours are less frequently found onsite this year (77% compared to 83%), making it difficult for shoppers to conveniently get in touch with retailers.



With customers shifting among channels, a universal list, optimally accessible in any channel, is now more frequently available (82% compared to 73%) with even more offering the ability to move an item from their cart to a saved list for future purchasing available (65% compared to 54%). Once orders are placed, providing a customer service phone number on the order confirmation sees slight improvement (81% compared to 77%).



Almost all benchmarked retailers.(98%) are prepopulating customer profiles in their shopping carts to save shoppers time. Half of retailers now facilitate one-click checkout, up from 43% in 2013. Payment options such as PayPal see increased deployment (68% compared to 62%), though mobile growth will likely mean greater payment competition in the near future.



The number of business days to receive the product, based on a choice of ground shipping, improved to 3.42 days, down from 3.8 in the prior year. More retailers (66% compared to 60%) have moved to a single return policy, while online returns processing is available on 38% of sites, up from 27% in 2013. The prepaid label is an added convenience and is provided on 64% of sites, compared to 59% in the prior year.