In fact, all but four of the retailers saw lower customer satisfaction than they had last spring. Overall satisfaction during the holiday season was down 4 percent from last spring, dropping to 73.5 from 76.7 on the ACSI's 100-point scale, said Larry Freed, president of Ann Arbor, Mich.-based ForeSee Results, an ACSI sponsor.
The highest-scoring retailers in the group during the holidays were Netflix, with a score of 84; Amazon, which got an 82; and L.L. Bean and QVC, both of which had scores of 80, according to the study.
Any retailer with a score over 80, which is considered excellent, is doing something right, Freed said. Even so, each of those retailers had lower scores than in the spring -- a troubling trend, he said.
The causes of the decline are twofold: Retailers were unable to satisfy first-time and infrequent visitors to their Web sites, and customers expect better service over the holidays than during the rest of the year, Freed said.
"At first, I was a little surprised by it," he said. "But as we started to look at the data and started to do the analysis, it makes a lot of sense. What we see in the holiday season are a couple things that have a downward pressure on satisfaction. The first is that consumer expectation is high. Their anxiety is high, their deadlines are firm, so holiday shopping is a challenge -- and it's magnified by the challenges retailers often have with inventory. With the hot products of the year, if you can't get them, it frustrates you and it drives satisfaction down.
"The second aspect that drives satisfaction down is the increase in traffic," Freed said. "A large percentage of the visitors to your site are infrequent or first-time visitors ... and they are hard to please for multiple reasons. But the primary reason is they don't know their way around the site. They're not familiar with your shipping policies, and they're not familiar with your inventory policies, so the first-time or infrequent shopper will experience far less satisfaction than a frequent visitor to a site."
The lowest scoring sites among the top 40 were CompUSA.com, which had a score of 67, and Kmart and Sears, which were tied at 68, according to the survey. The sites with the biggest drop from the spring to the holiday season were ToysRUs.com, which showed a 10 percent drop; OldNavy.com, which had a 9 percent drop; and Sears.com and JCPenney.com, which saw 8 percent drops, according to the survey. Freed said 26 of the top 40 sites had scores that dropped more than 4 percent, which is considered a significant change.
Buy.com was the only company with a rising score. It went from a score of 71 last spring to 72 over the holidays; 1800Flowers.com, BananaRepublic.com and Chadwicks.com remained the same, according to Freed.
The following are other findings from the ACSI study:
- Shopping search engines are failing to fulfill their promise to top retailers. Consumers who come to a retail Web site through a shopping search engine are less likely to come back, buy something or recommend the site to a friend than if they come because of a company promotion or a referral.
- A satisfied customer is a loyal customer. The customer segments with the highest satisfaction scores are also most likely to buy from the retailer again, online or off-line.
- Higher gas prices help online retailers. More than a third of respondents said that high gas prices influenced their decision to shop online instead of in stores.