Monday, November 13, 2000
Online Purchasers Want Customer Care
Customer service issues continue to limit online shopping
according to the Yankee Group's recently published
Report "When Bad Things Happen to Good Shoppers – The
Importance of Providing Quality Online Retail Customer
Service." The top five customer service related
issues that limit consumers' online shopping are: the
inability to tell the quality of merchandise via the
PC (65%), concern about the Web site's legitimacy (55%),
returning items bought online too difficult (52%),
not comfortable sending credit card number over the
Internet (52%), and the difficult navigation of retail
Web sites (35%). The Yankee Group believes that the
success of online retailers this holiday season will
be affected greatly by their ability to meet the customer
service expectations of their customers.
"When it comes to keeping customers happy, providing
quality customer service is one of the most valuable
strategies at an online retailer's disposal," according
to Christine Loeber, Program Manager of the Online Retail
Strategies Planning Service for the Yankee Group. "Additionally,
online retailers that pay close attention to the details
of customer service will be more successful in winning
and keeping customers, improving customer loyalty, and
increasing profitability than those that do not."
For years customer service has been a fundamental part
of consumers' offline shopping experiences, yet to date,
many online retailers have been remiss in recognizing
its importance in enhancing consumers' shopping experiences
online. Many online retailers remain very reactive about
customer service, making amends only after a customer
has had a bad shopping experience. And even those online
retailers that have started to think more proactively
about customer service too frequently fail in their efforts
to execute strategies that simply and effectively enhance
consumers' online shopping experiences.
The recently published Online Retail Strategies Report
titled "When Bad Things Happen to Good Shoppers – The
Importance of Providing Quality Online Retail Customer
Service" takes an in-depth look at the state of
customer service in online retail today and where it
needs to be tomorrow for online retailers to meet and
eventually exceed the expectations of online shoppers.
Additionally, this Report reviews the best practices
in online retail customer service and addresses factors
online retailers should consider when evaluating and
making adjustments to their existing customer service
strategy.
Internet-Based Polling Gets Presidential Results Right
The most accurate polling for the results of the presidential
election came from an Internet-based polling firm.
On November 6, Harris Interactive called the presidential
election a tie, a horse race and a dead heat. Harris
Interactive was right and has announced the comparison
of its polling predictions with the current, official
counts from the U.S. Presidential election.
Internet Polling Produces Accurate Results
The Harris Interactive Internet-based poll results based
on over 240,000 responses proved to be accurate — 97%
accurate to be exact. Based on election results reported
as of 11:00am EST November 8, 2000, Harris Interactive's
Internet-based poll correctly predicted (within a +/-
2% confidence level):
36 of 38 state presidential races (95%)
27 of 27 state senatorial races (100%)
7 out of 7 gubernatorial races (100%)
1 of 1 national presidential popular vote result (100%)
Harris Interactive predicted Gore would pull 47.4% versus
48.3% actual and predicted Bush with 47.2% versus 48.0%
actual.
Internet-based Polling is Here to Stay
The accuracy of the Harris Interactive poll confirms
the efficacy of Internet-based research in general
and the methodology of Harris Interactive in particular.
"Harris Interactive succeeded on a scale that cannot
be explained by luck, statistical accident or any other
false claim about what we do," stated Gordon S.
Black, chairman and CEO of Harris Interactive.
Methodology
The Harris Interactive Election 2000 study was conducted
between October 30 and November 6 with a total sample
of over 240,666 likely voters from the Harris Interactive
Inc. panel of Internet users. State sample sizes range
from 585 (in Hawaii) to 25,017 (in California). Data
were weighted by age, sex, education, income, race/ethnicity,
urbanicity, and the propensity to be online, in order
to generalize the results to the population of likely
voters in each state.
In theory, with a randomly chosen sample of this size
and after weighting the data, one could say with 95 percent
certainty that the results have a statistical precision
of approximately one to five percentage points of what
they would be if the entire likely voter population of
each state had been polled. The sample used by Harris
Interactive is not a random sample. While individuals
have been randomly sampled from the database for this
survey, they have previously chosen to take part in the
Harris Interactive database.
