Instant Impact: Customer Satisfaction with Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is one of those days that managers across America dread and loathe. Similar to what happens during the first few days of the NCAA basketball tournament, office productivity grinds to a halt on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, as computer screens are occupied with online shopping carts instead of spreadsheets and the attention of employees becomes fixed on shaving a few hundred dollars off the one big-ticket purchase they didn’t make on Black Friday.

The preliminary returns suggest that Cyber Monday 2007 was a rousing success for online retailers. Online sales for November 26th hit a record volume of $733 million, an increase of 21% over the haul for Cyber Monday 2006.

Clear evidence that Cyber Monday is a gold mine for online retailers and a lucrative way to kick-start the holiday sales season, right?

Well, from a short-term fiscal standpoint, yes. But short-term sales figures are not the be-all and end-all of website success. To understand Cyber Monday’s impact more holistically, we need to know the effect it had on customer satisfaction. With this in mind, I took a look at the iPSI scores for 4 studies currently running among brands that do a huge volume of business online and came up with these trending figures.

Interestingly, site satisfaction fell on November 26th in two of the four studies, while in Study D, the dip in satisfaction occurred a day earlier. Cyber Monday caused a slight up-tick in customer satisfaction in only one case. While sales went through the roof on November 26th, 2007, customer satisfaction was tepid at best. This is clearly not a satisfactory outcome for e-commerce websites looking to build momentum into December.

So, what’s causing this disconnect between sales volume and satisfaction? I think two factors might be in play.

- As the sales figures suggest, Cyber Monday has gone very much mainstream. While good from an awareness standpoint, the problem of meeting expectations now rears its ugly head. If an increasing number of website visitors are conditioned to believe that they will realize astronomical savings by shopping online on the first day back to work after Thanksgiving, then price cuts must be impressive. Otherwise, visitors could become frustrated that the discounts don’t live up to the hype.

- From a technical standpoint, a large influx of traffic will push server performance to its limits and could result in site failures. This happened with Yahoo Shopping in a very well publicized incident for which Yahoo issued a blog-based, public apology. Even minor delays in processing online orders can anger online shoppers and have deleterious long-term effects on site satisfaction.

Important cautionary notes for online retailers who were no doubt patting themselves on the back enthusiastically as the record number of dollars rolled in.