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This morning, Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, attributed the decrease in satisfaction to the smaller retailers. "The underlying message [from the study] is that big companies are doing well and the smaller speciality retailers are having trouble," Freed explained. "They have an uphill battle."

Freed said that the larger retailers scored "fairly well" because they can afford to make the investments in customer experience. He praised Amazon and Netflix for holding the top spots in the survey for customer satisfaction, and commended Netflix for maintaining high satisfaction levels while transitioning from a mail-order video company to a streaming video provider. "Any company that can go through a major transformation and still keep customer satisfaction along the way should really be applauded."

Also Freed said that over the past year, online retailers continued to focus on merchandising, pricing, and the customer experience, while online chat picked up steam. However, retailers still struggle with delivering an optimal chat experience. "Sometimes you get annoyed when every time you visit a site there's an invitation to chat," Freed said. "Some retailers are using it too aggressively and some are not using it enough. I think that may be the next phase of improving customer service."

While chat will continue to evolve this year, Freed predicts that mobile will make the biggest impact on e-commerce in 2011, with an increasing number of consumers using it to match prices while in the physical stores. "It will be an interesting challenge to deal with that."