Online Businesses Beat Offline Businesses in Customer Satisfaction

One of the prerequisites of successful online business is a commitment to customer satisfaction. The online customer simply doesn’t take the kind of abuse, disregard, or obfuscation that the offline customer is often resigned to. Online customers can go elsewhere at the click of a button; off-line businesses often perceive their customers to be captive because of the difficulty of going elsewhere, which can lead to habitually poor service by offline businesses.

The University of Michigan and ForeSee Results have just released the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which shows that customer satisfaction with e-commerce now surpasses that of offline business by 11.6 percent.

The Customer Satisfaction Index is a 100-point scale, and on that scale e-commerce scored an average of 80 against off-line businesses average of 68.4. Online retail scored 83 as opposed to offline retail’s score of 74.