Answers Report Provides Insights For VARs Serving Retail

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Answers Corporation, a provider of cloud-based voice of customer solutions and owner of the Internet brand Answers.com, has released of The Answers Experience Index (AXI): 2014 U.S. Retail Edition. The study includes more than 40,000 consumer surveys gathered for the top 100 retail websites, top 30 retail chain stores, and top 30 mobile experiences between October 26 and December 15, 2014, according to a press release.

For VARs servicing the retail industry, the report offers some important insights. One of the chief findings of the study is that customer experience is a clear factor in future engagement such as purchase, loyalty, and spreading positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Ultimately, the study found that overall customer satisfaction scores fell for retail chain stores and e-commerce websites compared to last year, while scores for mobile sites and apps remained static, driven largely by a rising tide of customer expectations. The study revealed that the modern shopper is deeply multichannel, and multidevice driven, performing research across channels, and doing price comparisons online and in-store.

“Having rich content on their mobile site is critical for retail chain stores, since 46 percent of showrooming shoppers are buying in-store anyway,” according to the report.

And shoppers using multiple channels to shop tend to come away more satisfied: The satisfaction score for shoppers using three or more channels stands at 81 for the holiday shopping season, compared with 79 for two channels and 77 for a single channel.

The study highlights the need for increased attention to the multichannel shopper. That means strengthening website design and mobile options that will leverage information to push sales. And with customers increasingly mobilizing, especially when it comes to researching purchases and making transactions, attention to mobile capabilities are a must. However, the study showed, mobile payments are not quite ready for takeoff, with more than 60 percent of shoppers unwilling to use a mobile payment service like Google Wallet or Apple Pay to purchase items in a store.

And despite the predictions that e-commerce would kill brick-and-mortar retail, the evidence demonstrates that in-store purchases still account for the vast majority of retail transactions. Physical storefronts are actually enabling omnichannel consumption by leveraging innovations like “buy online/pick-up in store” and in-store mobile checkouts.