Nordstrom ranks highest among luxury retailers in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new survey of wealthy shoppers by the Luxury Institute, a research firm in New York.

Seattle-based Nordstrom scored 8.41 out of a possible 10 in the 2012 Luxury Consumer Experience Index, followed by Bergdorf Goodman, at 8.37, and Barney’s New York, at 8.23.

Nordstrom was also the most widely visited luxury retailer, with 36 percent of wealthy shoppers surveyed having shopped at a Nordstrom store in the past 12 months.

Survey participants reported an average income of $292,000 and average net worth of $3 million.

Meanwhile, 96 percent of shoppers plan to shop at Nordstrom again and 94 percent recommend the retailer to their friends and family.

Salesforce.com the enterprise cloud computing company announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, 2012.

Social enterprises delight customers by putting them at the heart of their business," said Dave Kellogg, senior vice president and general manager, Service Cloud, salesforce.com. "We believe this Magic Quadrant position cements the Service Cloud's leadership and demonstrates why it is trusted to power contact centers both large and small at leading business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies. The Service Cloud delivers customer service for the social enterprise in an integrated, cross-channel way that no one else can match.

The Temkin Group, a consultancy, polled 255 representatives of firms with revenues topping $500m, and found that just 7% of the panel believed the customer experience they provided was superior to all of their rivals.

A further 28% placed performance levels "considerably above" the industry average, while 30% "slightly" improved on the norm, and 23% fell into line with typical standards for their sector.

Some 11% of operators rated their performance across shopper touchpoints as "slightly" lower than their category, and 2% were "considerably below" this benchmark.

Looking ahead three years, 10% of businesses wanted to become cross-industry leaders in this area, and 49% hoped to assume a similar status within their specific market.

Of the rest, 28% set the goal of being "considerably above average" measured against their direct competitors, 8% wished to "slightly" better the opposition and 4% were seeking to match the norm.

Kristina: The integration of social with email is getting a lot of play. What is it about these two forms of advertising that mesh so well?

Shawn Myers, Responsys Director of Product Marketing: Email still provides major brands a powerful mechanism to deliver highly targeted and personalized content to their consumers. Today, many consumers engage in social conversations by sharing their ideas, questions, and comments about products and services on brands' web sites or their social media channels, especially Facebook. By integrating social and email, brands are now able to leverage consumers' social behavior to create more relevant and personalized email marketing messages.
The integration between the Responsys Interact Suite and the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Platform allows brand marketers to easily and effectively reach consumers in real-time with personalized email messages based on their specific comments, questions, and ratings about various products and services. Furthermore, marketers can easily assess the consumer engagements with those emails for follow-up re-targeting via personalized email, mobile, social or display advertising messages orchestrated through the Responsys Interact Suite.

A new survey finds California health agencies do a pretty good job in answering questions from consumers. The survey used "mystery shoppers" to make more than 200 phone calls.

The non-profit group Health Access California conducted the study. More than a dozen people posed questions to four key health agencies, including the Department of Insurance.

The queries ranged from problems with enrollment in health plans, to difficulty in getting an appointment with a specialist.

Anthony Wright heads up Health Access. He said for the most part, callers got the help they needed without having to wait.

Ingenico (Euronext: FR0000125346 - ING), leading worldwide provider of payment solutions, and Saygent, the pioneer of mobile voice feedback, today announced a strategic partnership which gives merchants on Ingenico's new Mobile Retail Platform (iMRP) an innovative solution to deliver invaluable timely customer feedback. Immediately after making a purchase customers are asked their thoughts on their shopping experience to better gauge their true feelings in the moments after completing their transaction via Saygent's on-the-go voice feedback solution.

In today's fast paced era of mobile and in-store retail purchases, merchants are continuously looking for non-traditional approaches to obtain customer feedback in order to make to better decisions on how to enhance the consumer shopping experience in their stores. Merchants know that consumers are no longer interested in taking the time for traditional surveys, that are often sent and conducted days or sometimes weeks after the purchase experience, and rarely facilitate a meaningful exchange of information. This unstructured and loosely quantified stream of information only provides merchants with a tiny fraction of the framework for making important decisions. According to the retail industry consumer reports, consumers are talking and have plenty to say about the brands that touch their lives. They eagerly share their feedback both in the form of negative rants and glowing raves on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets.