Morrisons appears at long last to have something to smile about. The supermarket’s online shopping service is now significantly ahead of all of its rivals in the latest Customer Experience Magazine/SpectrumInsight digital shopping tracker covering the period from 1 May to 30 June, 2014.
Morrisons’ online shopping has performed consistently well on the tracker since it launched at the start of the year but this is the first time it has taken top spot, ahead of Topshop and the company through which its online service is delivered, Ocado.
Social insight specialists SpectrumInsight obtain their revealing statistics by analyzing the positive and negative tweets made by customers about the service.
The latest figures also reveal better news for Waitrose, whose delivery service has taken a battering since problems surfaced leading up to last Christmas. Although Waitrose’s score is only just in positive territory, at 0.7%, this is a significant shift against the -5.4% and -4.1% that it managed over the previous two periods.
Asda, on the other hand, continues to take the wooden spoon in bottom spot, with a score of -5.9%, struggling alongside M&S which is on 5.85%. Averaged over the year to date Asda’s performance has been woeful and twice as bad as the retailer above them, which again is M&S.
Despite Asda and M&S’s problems, the overall score across all retailers in the tracker has increased significantly over the previous period. But before we get too carried away by the prospect of an improving customer experience in online shopping, SpectrumInsight’s director, Mark Westaby, warns this could simply be a seasonal effect brought on by the summer. He believes that this is something customer experience professionals need to be more aware of when assessing performance.
Commenting on the findings, Mr Westaby says: “We believe that market research findings are much more prone to the national mood than many people would like to believe. It does not, therefore, surprise us too much to see scores in the tracker improve over the start of the summer when people are generally feeling more upbeat.
“It should also be remembered that relatively simple things, such as lighter evenings and better weather, can have a positive impact, for instance by enabling more deliveries to be made on time than is the case when traffic is struggling to cope with poor conditions.
“From a customer experience perspective it is very important to take such factors into account. Otherwise, organisations can very easily be lulled into a false sense of security that a service is improving when this is not necessarily the case.”