BizRate to monitor in-store customer satisfaction for Office Depot stores - Market Intelligence

Information Superhighways Newsletter, Feb, 2002

BizRate.com (www.bizrate.com), a research leader and the No. 1 comparison shopping site on the Web, announced it will provide a nationwide in-store customer satisfaction monitoring program for Office Depot, a seller of office products. Under the new agreement, BizRate.com will provide customer satisfaction measures for its more than 850 brick-and-mortar stores in North America, in addition to powering Office Depot's online customer satisfaction performance tracking. Earlier this year, the multi-channel research leader BizRate.com began monitoring in-store customer satisfaction for Office Depot.

BizRate will provide an in-depth look at satisfaction measures including: overall shopping experience; ease and speed of checkout; ease of finding products; and product selection and delivery, and will be incorporated into Office Depot's Executive Information System. Officedepot.com became a Gold Star Merchant on BizRate in 1999 and has since been rated by over 100,000 customers, averaging at 8.7 or higher on a ten point scale at the point of sale, based on detailed analysis on measures such as Web site performance, product and price.

Merchants who have experienced the largest order growth consistently outperform low growth merchants on all customer satisfaction metrics. Past experience, good prices, and free shipping head the list of importance to online shoppers, according to research by BizRate.com, which already measures the online customer satisfaction performance of more than 2,000 e-tailers.

Customers who wish to participate are invited to log onto the co-branded site, www.od.bizrate.com to take a brief survey and to be automatically registered for a chance to win valuable prizes from Office Depot. No purchase is necessary to enter the sweepstakes.