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.

Pepsi Goes Beyond 2.0

The Pepsi Generation is very much the web 2.0 generation, so it is appropriate that for 2007, Pepsi (through their agency Tribal DDB) is taking consumer online engagement and brand dynamism to a level not often seen.

Pepsi will be launching a new can/bottle design every three weeks, with each can design being themed to a consumer passion, and linked to a different online microsite that engages consumers in generating content around that theme. The dozen or so themes will include cars, music, fashion, entertainment and sports.



Pepsi’s first site was thisisthebeginning, which encouraged visitors to use a series of templated tools to collectively design a Pepsi billboard. The winning design will become a real billboard that will appear in Times Square.



The next site, pepsifreeride.com, focuses on cars, where visitors can play an online driving game and enter a lottery to win a specially customised Subaru Impreza.



Future microsites will let visitors design their own Pepsi can, with the possibility of the winner’s can actually making it onto the market. Another site will let visitors use their computer keyboard to create music.

You can see all of the Pepsi can designs at pepsigallery.com.