Survey says majority of companies violate customers' online privacy, ignore their queries.

The nation's 100 largest companies have improved in responding to online customer services but still have a ways to go, a study finds.

The 2004 Online Customer Respect Study that was released today found that many companies still do not take the Internet seriously. They fail to respond to customers' queries and also continue to violate customer's privacy by sharing personal data with other companies.

"One-third of these companies aren't responding to all the Web site queries they get," says David Fairchild, president of the Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that conducted the study. "I think this is really important from the standpoint that 10.6 percent of all transactions in the U.S. are initiated by a visit to a Web site. That includes buying your cup of coffee in the morning or buying an automobile. It ranges from someone who goes on an Amazon.com site to not only look for a book but find it and purchase it and have it delivered to them so that it consummates the entire sale online."

The study scores each company on a scale of zero-10, based on six attributes:
simplicity (ease of navigation), responsiveness (quick and thorough responses to inquiries), privacy (respects customer privacy), attitude (customer-focus of site), transparency (open and honest policies) and principles (values and respects customer data). This year, the study also factored in a category for individuals with conditions that affect their ability to use Web sites, such as colorblindness.
 
Fairchild says there was a wide range of scores. Microsoft Corp. received the best score at 8.7 followed by Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. at 8.6 and 8.5. Weyerhaeuser Co., Johnson Controls Inc. and Supervalu Inc. were at the bottom at 3.5, 3.2 and 2.7 respectively. The average CRI score was 6.2

"Those companies at the top distinguished themselves because they were uniformly good in every category and particularly good in the area of transparency, which means they were real upfront and honest about the policies," says Fairchild, who adds that these sites are also simple and easy to navigate. "They've done a great job of communicating to people from a marketing standpoint. They are doing an outstanding communication job of telling people how they do business."

The survey found that more than 50 percent of the companies passed personal information to other companies and affiliates (35 percent) or business partners (23 percent) without getting the customer's approval -- a deterrent for customers who are interesting in signing up for a newsletter as they don't want to share their information with outside parties.

The companies, however, want the opposite. "They want the ability to be able to easily see what you are doing with the data and then they want to be able to opt-in for every use of that," Fairchild says.

The study also found that most of the companies fared best overall in simplicity (average score of 7.3) and worst in responsiveness (a 4.4 average). About 12 percent of respondents don't respond to any online inquiries and 21 percent responded to only half. Of these, 60 percent responded to emails in less than a day. About 85 percent of companies provide email forms for online inquiries and 14 percent provide email addresses. About 93 percent provide a privacy policy that state how they use personal data.

Companies should work at improving their sites and relationships with customers, especially as the Internet becomes a bigger vehicle for in peoples' lives, Fairchild says.

"Users expectations are very dynamic to changing, they are growing. As people get more experience with using the Web, more of them do use the Internet to assist in decision making about what to buy and from who to buy from. [Customers] have a much more level playing field in terms of information available to them in making that decision."