14 DAY TRIAL // Who is doing a great job at maximizing the shopper experience? According to a survey of retail industry experts, customer service and the total shopper experience are considered the most important elements for creating customer satisfaction. Apple ranked #1 in creating a superior experience, ifoAppleStore, the primary source dealing exclusively with news and information about Apple’s retail establishments, reports.
“Of course, with the shopper experience, like everything else, the proof is in the actual results at retail,” RetailWire and Dechert-Hampe, the two firms behind the RETAIL:NEXT Studies, say. “We gave our respondents a list of 60 major retailers and asked them to name three leaders in shopper experience.” The PDF report (available for download here) shows the resulting rankings (pictured above) with the overall percent of respondents mentioning each retailer as a leader. As shown, 28% of respondents picked Apple as the leader.
“Apple Stores was the clear leader in shopper experience with mentions by 28% of the respondents,” RetailWire and Dechert-Hampe claim. “This is not surprising since Apple Stores offers an engaging shopping experience with unique products and a very experiential shopping environment. In some sense, this choice is inconsistent with the overall findings of the survey which tend to underplay the value of technology. However, it is apparent that technology alone doesn’t make a great shopper experience. It is the combination of high-tech and high touch that truly delights the shopper,” they conclude.
Apple usually ranks very high in customer-satisfaction surveys. At the beginning of this year, the American magazine Consumers Report conducted a survey on over 7,000 desktop and laptop owners. The respondents were asked to quantify the ability of their hardware vendors to solve problems via communicational abilities, knowledge of phone support staff, by how long they’d be put on hold when calling up the support department, and, most importantly, the overall quality of the support services. Consumers Report proudly crowned Apple, awarding it an A+ for both the quality of the staff at its retail stores and the efficiency of the overall service.