Customer experience. Bet you’ve heard that phrase a few times in the past year or so, right?

Well, you have for good reason. It is quickly becoming top priority for businesses increasingly seeking to hold onto the profitable consumers they have because, in many cases, they cannot spend the money it takes to acquire new ones. Particularly as more consumers are going online to conduct their transactions, it is no longer a nice-to-have for businesses to have clear, engaging, and functionally sound Web sites.

“Our Web site is our store,” said Matt Raines, vice president of technology at Bluefly.com. “If any single area of the site — our home page, checkout, anything — goes down, we lose money and credibility.”

Online customer experience ruled the night during a roundtable discussion Tuesday at Gramercy Tavern with Tealeaf, Harris Interactive, Forrester Research, and Tealeaf customers Quicken Loans and Bluefly.com — executives, analysts, and members of the media discussed the findings in the fifth annual online consumer behavior survey Tealeaf commissions with Harris Interactive.

According to the research, 48 percent of online adults said they are conducting more online transactions this year than in 2008. Why? The most popular answer among 75 percent of those who shop online responded it was due to “the ability to compare products and prices.” To Geoff Galat, vice president of worldwide marketing at Tealeaf, that “made complete, logical sense.”

A more encouraging statistic, according to Galat, was the fact that 80 percent experienced problems conducting online transactions in 2009.  This, shockingly enough, is down from the approximate 87 percent that it had been hovering around in the past few studies. Additionally, the percentage of people who did run into problems were less likely to abandon the Web site this year, dropping 9 percentage points to 32 percent.

Another important statistic included the percentage of people willing to reach out to a contact center with any Web site problems — plummeting from 47 percent in 2008 to 38 percent this year. All the while, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the percentage of those sharing their experiences via social networks doubled, up to 12 percent in 2009. “We’re starting to see less people contacting companies and sharing in other places,” Galat said. “People want to talk about the company, not to the company.”

Furthermore, only 30 percent of those who are contributing feedback on social networks even want to get a vendor response. This begs an important question for any business providing a product or service that comes across a negative comment. Do you respond or not?

This was something Matt Cardwell, Web marketing director at Quicken Loans, said his company had to tackle, albeit with some initial growing pains. Different members of the company would respond, “ones that probably should not be doing that type of work,” he admitted. He added that as a result, his company took a more cohesive approach by training employees on how — and when — to respond to social media comments about Quicken Loans. “It’s a question of scaling and magnitude,” he said of when Quicken Loans will respond to positive or negative social media posts.

More information and statistics uncovered in this year’s study can be found here.

What do you believe to be some of the more pertinent online customer experience issues and trends today?