Yellow Scores Highest in Customer Respect Study

The Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that investigates how corporations treat their online customers, has ranked Yellow Transportation No. l in the Transportation, Distribution and Logistics category with a Customer Respect IndexTM (CRI) score of 7.8.

"We are honored to receive this recognition for our online customer service," said James Welch, president and CEO of Yellow Transportation. "We are extremely proud to have earned this top rating. We appreciate the dedication and professionalism our employees demonstrate every day to provide the best service possible."

The U.S. Postal Service was ranked second at 7.7, and United Parcel Service was third at 7.0. These top, three companies were the only companies that scored 7.0 or more, the benchmark level for excellence.

The Customer Respect Group evaluates websites of an industry's leading companies to provide qualitative and quantitative analysis of the companies' performance from a customer's perspective. Companies are assigned a CRI score based on the results. Analysis is based on concepts and sub-indices that customers list as their critical concerns when using websites:

Site Usability: Does a wide range of people find the site easy or hard to use?
Simplicity: ease of use
Attitude: accessibility and inclusion for a broad range of individuals

Communication: Does the company provide customer service in the form of one-on-one communication to respond to specific questions?
Responsiveness: quality of email replies (including speed and helpfulness), response tone and other communication methods

Trust: Can customers trust the site with their personal information?
Transparency: how clear and comprehensive privacy policies are
Principles: respect for data privacy and cookie explanations
Privacy: Includes Transparency and Principles together
Stephen Bruffett, Yellow Transportation senior vice president of sales and marketing, said the website was always designed with customer privacy and customer control of personal data in mind, up to and including the customer being able to restrict access or delete that data.

The top CRI score "makes us feel good about the years of effort and investment we've made in this tool. It's been front and center in terms of what we've been trying to accomplish, which is to be easy to do business with," Bruffett said.

Yellow consistently monitors website use and gathers feedback from customers to improve the site and technology. Customer comments and requests led to tool integration just this year—customers can get a quote, click a button to transfer quote information to a bill of lading, then track shipments in the system.

The Transportation, Distribution and Logistics industry as a whole performed better than average in cross-industry comparisons with an overall CRI of 6.1, which was 0.4 higher than other industries' averages. The industry scored particularly well in Principles at 6.7 versus 5.6 for the cross-industry average. High scores in Principles indicate that the transportation industry as a whole is more respectful of personal information than other industries.

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