Amazon beats Flipkart when it comes to customer service in India: Forrester survey

The biggest mover was Jabong, which emerged as one of the most consumer-friendly online businesses around, reports Tech in Asia

Amazon and Bigbasket have aced customer service in India, beating rivals Flipkart and Grofers respectively, according to Forrester’s India Customer Experience Index, 2016.

The biggest mover, however, was Jabong, which emerged as one of the most consumer-friendly online businesses around. Jabong was bought by Flipkart earlier this year for about $70 million, effectively rescuing the company from a burnout.

"In general, digital-only retailers are realising that deep discounting as a customer acquisition strategy leads to a downward spiral," Amit Bhatia, senior analyst at Forrester, wrote.

"With no profits to show, increasingly impatient investors, and the threat of foreign entrants with even deeper pockets looming large, many digital retailers have now begun to publicly claim to focus on delivering a differentiated CX (customer experience) instead," Bhatia added.

Forrester surveyed 18,033 metropolitan Indian online adult customers for the report.

Improving customer experience has swiftly become the main talking point among start-ups, as they rejig themselves to chase loyalty and user stickiness. Both Flipkart and Snapdeal long used gross merchandise numbers to claim leading market positions, but suddenly shifted their focus to other metrics this year.

Industry watchers think late entrant Amazon is the reason why. India’s e-commerce bigwigs have now started talking about net promoter score (NPS), customer care, retention, and improved delivery times as their most important metrics.

In the past, they have chased "growth" at the cost of customer experience, which led to a number of start-ups being forced to roll back services, or even shut shop as customers refused to come back and place enough orders to keep the business afloat.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here