The customer experience analytics company ClickFox (News - Alert) recently released the results of a consumer survey it took, which audited customer service experience and purchase behavior during the holiday season at various businesses popular around this time of year. The winners turned out to be Amazon and Best Buy, two companies described as providing the best overall customer experience during the fairly stressful, shopping-crazed, shopper-saturated holiday season.

“Consumers have become adept at identifying the easiest customer service resolution,” explained Marco Pacelli, ClickFox’s CEO, in a statement. “The findings of our research should serve as a wake-up call for those in the retail industry: if they continue to fail to provide stellar in-store customer service, they risk losing customers to online competitors.”

Both Amazon and Best Buy (News - Alert) have a large online marketplace, which was shown to be the preferred method for holiday shopping, according to the study. There are just too many hassles to deal with when it comes to in-store and call center service representatives--the results of the study revealed many more negative experiences correlated to those environments than the more comfortable option of shopping from home.

“As we’ve seen with analysis of more than 12 billion customer touch points annually, when retailers fail to resolve customer service inquiries at the first point of service, companies can expect increased service overhead and decreased customer loyalty as consumers are forced to utilize multiple service channels to resolve their issues,” said Pacelli.

The specifics of the study are as follows: 62 percent of respondents plan on shopping mainly online this year, and 78 percent noted especially positive service experience when shopping online.

In contrast, 50 percent of consumers cited negative experiences when dealing with contact centers and sales floor representatives, and 52 percent reported having to speak with a manager to resolve issues, which hints at the failings of lower-level in-store representatives.

With Black Friday (News - Alert) just around the corner, this survey should prove useful for companies looking to keep loyal customers coming.

For a look at the complete infographic results, click here.