Customer Respect Index Up, Gains Uneven

Ipswich, MA, December 7, 2005--The Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that focuses on how corporations treat their online customers, today released findings from its Fourth Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study of Transportation, Distribution and Logistics Industry. This is the fifth study conducted on the industry. The study is the only one to bring an objective and consistent measure to the analysis of corporate performance from an online customer’s perspective. It assigns a Customer Respect Index (CRI) rating for each company. The Customer Respect Index is a qualitative and quantitative in-depth analysis and an independent measure of a customer’s experience when interacting with companies via the Internet. By interviewing a representative sample of the adult Internet users and by analyzing and categorizing more than 2,000 corporate websites across a spectrum of industries, The Customer Respect Group has identified the attributes that together measure the online customer experience. This report analyzed mail, package and freight delivery, trucking and truck leasing, and mail facilitation websites to obtain a good sample of the sector. Overall, the transportation, distribution and logistics industry scored a CRI rating of 7.0, versus 6.6 for its last report in the second quarter of 2005. This continues a slow yet consistent trend of steady improvement for the industry. The score moves the industry from fifth position to a joint second in the Industry Table, just behind the airline and travel industry. The improvements, however, are largely concentrated in the mail, package and freight delivery sector. The websites from five sector firms ranked excellent, including Overnite Transportation Company, Canada Post, Purolator, United Parcel Service (UPS) and the United States Postal Service. Currently only 28 companies maintain the excellent score. These companies have consistently performed well in recent studies and in many ways went against some of the key trends seen across the industry. The industry showed continuing growth in sophistication and an ability to reuse customer information, especially for ongoing marketing back to the customer base. Much of this marketing is performed without the explicit consent of the customer. One year ago, 33 percent of companies studied consistently reused information for marketing. Six months ago the figure grew to 42 percent, and in this study the number has grown to 67 percent. The reuse of information extended beyond the organization. Nearly a quarter of the companies either share information externally or are ambiguous, up from 16 percent. In marked contrast, the leading companies in the study have, for the most part, migrated to an “opt-in” strategy, where there is no reuse of personal information without explicit consent. Similar findings exist in the area of one-on-one communications. While the level of ignored e-mails remained steady, even showing a slight increase at 23 percent, the leading companies all exhibited significantly improved levels of service. This seems to demonstrate an increasing gap between companies to manage the increasing capacity of e-mail traffic as customers migrate to email as a preferred communication method. The industry showed a marginal improvement in timeliness of email responses, with 61 percent being returned within a day of receipt, up from 55 percent, but the general helpfulness of those responses showed a slight decline. A key finding was the improvement in clarity of policies as explained to the customer. Transparency is an important first step to improving customer-orientated policies. All the companies studied now make mention of their policies toward personal data, the first time this has been true in the industry.