Amazon, Apple Soar In Customer Satisfaction In 2011; Netflix Plummets
According to customer experience analytics company ForeSee, e-commerce giant Amazon once again topped consumer satisfaction in online retail after taking the top spot in 2010. However, Netflix, which had a dismal year, plummeted in customer satisfaction.
Context & Ripple Effects
ForeSee's 2011 index confirms what its 2010 ranking suggested: Amazon's retail experience is now the benchmark in online shopping, and the company defended the top spot in the same month it pushed hardware into the holiday fight — a [[a:1161108-placeholder|display shoot-out]] of the Kindle Fire against Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet and Apple's iPad 2 ran just a week before these scores landed, alongside the quiet Quorus acquisition and a new Cambridge engineering office. Satisfaction leadership is arriving precisely as Amazon widens from storefront to devices and software.
Netflix's plunge is the mirror image: a dismal year ended with the company holding a massive engagement lead — viewers spend twice as long on Netflix as on Hulu — yet scoring badly on satisfaction. It echoes the argument in June's Atlantic piece that content isn't king: Netflix's licensed-catalog strategy kept people watching without keeping them happy, and ForeSee's numbers put a scorecard on that gap.
First-order effects
- Amazon enters 2012 with third-party validation of the trust that underpins its retail flywheel, at the exact moment the Kindle Fire needs that goodwill against Apple and Barnes & Noble.
- Netflix faces elevated churn risk heading into renewal season: the ForeSee drop quantifies subscriber anger even though its viewing-time lead over Hulu remains intact.
Second-order effects
- Barnes & Noble gains a marketing angle for the Nook Tablet — positioning itself as the alternative to both Amazon's device and Apple's premium tablet on experience rather than price alone.
- Rival retailers and streaming services are forced to treat satisfaction measurement as a competitive metric, since ForeSee's annual ranking now publicly separates Amazon's service bar from everyone else's.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual customer-experience indices become a standing scoreboard that shapes consumer and investor perception of platform companies independently of usage or revenue.
- Amazon's habit of absorbing small acquisitions like Quorus and folding their teams into Seattle points toward satisfaction being engineered through continuous integration of features, not campaigns — a structural advantage smaller rivals struggle to replicate.
The trend: Customer-satisfaction rankings are hardening into an annual industry scoreboard in which Amazon compounds a service-driven advantage while content platforms learn that engagement does not guarantee goodwill.