I have been aware of the Zendesk Customer Service Benchmark Report in the past, but somehow my good intentions of reading it always fell short. Determined to actually read the report for Q2, I opted to kill a tree and print it so I could mark it up. Don’t judge me. I found the report to have several interesting nuggets that any company concerned with customer satisfaction should consider.
Nugget #1- The more words, the lower the satisfaction- Customer satisfaction drops significantly as the word count increases on support emails submitted via a web form. The effect was not the same when tickets were submitted via email. Before doing away with your support email address and channeling your customers to a web form, keep in mind that unhappy customers may appreciate the extra time to edit and save their drafts when submitting a ticket via their preferred email client. Also, pay attention to those long emails from customers. Those are most likely the unhappy ones that could use a higher priority and some extra attention.
Nugget #2- Keep the “Best wishes” to yourself- Customer satisfaction was significantly lower in cases where customer service signed off with “Best wishes” (72.6%), as opposed to “Best regards” (83.3%), “Cheers” (85.8%), and “Yours Sincerely” (86.4%). Even having nothing at all (81.4%) is better than saying “Best wishes.” It’s time to rethink those sign-off phrases–in fact, I just changed mine!
Nugget #3- Email domain matters- There is a significant amount of variance in customer satisfaction based on the email domain of the customer. Customers with Yahoo addresses scored an average of 75.4%, whereas .Mac users averaged 84.7%. This is another case where it may be wise to prioritize customer service based on the email domain in order to achieve higher customer satisfaction across the board.
The final insight I found to be interesting is the breakdown of customer satisfaction by industry. In particular, customers based in India (58%) were by far less satisfied than any other country. It is fascinating to see benchmarking data that matches what we are experiencing at our company!
Take a moment to read the latest Customer Service Benchmark report from Zendesk and share some of your favorite insights with us!
