Amazon Voice of the Customer and Other Seller Metric Updates

Amazon announced that on the first day of the fourth quarter, October 1, they will replace the Performance Notifications page in Seller Central with a more comprehensive page to help sellers monitor their account health in a more accurate fashion. In addition, they will be removing the Customer Service Dissatisfaction Rate, Contact Response Time, and Refund Rate metrics to better align their seller performance policies with the metrics outlined on the Account Health page.

Which Metrics Are Being Removed?

Customer Service Dissatisfaction Rate is the percentage of customers who are not satisfied with the seller’s response in Buyer-Seller Messaging, designed to help you understand issues that can potentially lead to an A-Z Claim or negative feedback. When a seller responds to a buyer’s message about a specific order, Amazon includes a customer survey below the response that says, “Did this solve your problem?” The buyer can answer “Yes” or “No.” Only a seller can see a buyer’s response. To calculate the rate, the number of “No” votes is divided by the total number of survey responses expressed as a percentage and Amazon only counts the latest survey vote for each order. If the seller addresses the issue and the buyer later changes their response to “Yes,” their previous “No” vote is discounted.

Contact Response Time is the metric that is calculated based on the amount of time that elapses between when a buyer message is received and when your response is sent through Buyer-Seller Messaging, including weekends and holidays. The metric has two subcategories — response times over 24 hours and messages with no response. Refund Rate, although low impact, was a metric that historically played a role in determining the Buy Box winner. It is how often customers ask for a refund and is calculated by the last 30-day time period.

Voice of the Customer

In addition to the removal of these three metrics, Amazon has implemented a new metric called Customer Experience (CX), found in a dashboard titled “Voice of the Customer.” Within the new dashboard, the CX Health of your offers will be displayed, as well as customer comments used to help you pinpoint product and listing issues. CX Health is categorized as either excellent, good, fair, poor, or very poor. The Negative Customer Experience (NCX) rate is the number of orders that the customer reported a product or listing issue divided by the total orders. Negative customer experiences that deal with delivery problems will not affect your CX metrics.

Amazon will determine your CX Health by comparing your item’s Negative Customer Experience rate with those of similar items, based on recent orders and customer feedback. As you prepare for the busiest season of the year, Amazon is cracking down on how your performance compares to that of your peers. Monitoring the CX Health of your items can help you respond to any issues that can impact the end-to-end customer experience as quickly as possible.