Are response times, shipping or returns the biggest consumer headache?
We talk a lot about the quality of customer service in this space, and it seems obvious that responding quickly to consumers is a big component of doing customer service right.
Yet, in a new study, only 18 percent of companies in the apparel/accessories category responded to an e-mail within four hours, and 32 percent of them took more than 12 hours to reply. On the other hand, overall top performer L.L.Bean responded to e-mails in less than an hour, on average. The Stella Services benchmark study involved 115 online retailers covering Q2 2015.
Stella's study rated retailers across five categories: e-mail, chat, phone, shipping and returns. Overall, it explored three metrics:
- Response time: e-mail (response time to initial email); chat
(total time to live agent); and phone (total time to live agent); - Shipping: correct product arrival; checkout issues encountered; product damage encountered; package trackability; and total days to delivery;
- Returns: inclusion of label, prepaid label, adhesive label; refund type; return package trackability; days to authorization; total days to refund processed.
Source: llbean.com
L.L.Bean also did well on return orders checked by Stella Service analysts by including prepaid adhesive return labels, and processing returns in a week. And L.L.Bean ranked in the top 25 of retailers monitored in four of the five categories measured, and in the top six for three of the five categories.
Another stellar performer was bodybuilding.com, which took only 14 seconds to pick up the phone and delivered 100 percent of packages within two days. iHerb took only five seconds to connect to a chat agent, and Burberry was best at processing a refund, taking just over five days.
The top five performers overall, in order, were L.L.Bean, Mr. Porter, Shopbop, David Yurman, and Net-A-Porter. Other notables making the top 25 included Barneys, Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom, Brooks Brothers, 1-800 Flowers, Bass Pro Shops, Apple, Vitamin Shop, Cabela's and Coach.