Amazon beats Flipkart, Bigbasket beats Grofers in customer experience: Forrester

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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 customer-friendly online businesses around. Jabong was bought by Flipkart earlier this year for about US$70 million, effectively rescuing the company from a burnout.

See: Bad business: how India’s startups are chasing growth but messing up customer service

“In general, digital-only retailers are realizing 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 instead.”

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

Improving customer experience has swiftly become the main talking point among startups, 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.

See: Snapdeal, Flipkart learn from Amazon as ecommerce focus shifts in India

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

Analysts say this is important, because ecommerce startups need to build a repeat customer base to eventually gain profitability.

In the past, they have chased “growth” at the cost of customer experience, which led to a number of startups 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.

See: Why India’s third largest online grocer which raised over $50m is shutting shop