Excellent online customer service could well be worth US$17.3 billion by the time the year’s out, according to a new Ovum survey commissioned by StellaService.
That is the round figure for the 10.7% premium the report suggests customers are glad to dish out for good customer service.

The survey was conducted on multiple fronts: financial services, healthcare, utilities and retail, including both brick-and-mortar and online and stores. The total value of great customer service across all categories, both online and off, was $268 billion per year, or a 9.7% premium.

The fact that online consumers are willing to pay an additional percentage is not all that shocking. The value of good customer service for e-tailers is what Jordy Leiser, cofounder and CEO of StellaService, found fascinating:

“It was quite a shock for us, actually, especially considering that so few companies meet the criteria for offering this level of service…One is that it has all of the necessary online tools and interfaces — which includes comprehensive content. The second is the shipping delivery and return polices. Are consumers able to easily execute the returns process?”

There is a whole lot of difference among e-tailers in this category, with pluses like the prepaid envelope which Zappos sends to consumers, as well as negatives such as the many hoops that some e-commerce sites still make consumers jump through to return a product.

The third element is human support. To put it to the test, the survey called each retailer more than 10 times to ask questions about certain products, business operations and personal concerns.

In conjunction with the survey, StellaService compiled a list of customer rankings for the largest 150 e-commerce sites. Diapers.com and BlueNile.com were in the top three positions, in that order. They were followed by Amazon.com, Staples.com, Crutchfield.com, LLBean.com, BestBuy.com, Apple.com, Sears.com and REI.com.

Rounding out the top 15 were Ebags.com, Onlineshoes.com, Orvis.com and Netflix.com.

Leiser said:

“As you can see, only a few companies really do this well…Generally speaking, most firms tend to fall in the middle-of -the-pack range and don’t take an obsessive customer service approach.”