Post summary:
- The SuperOffice customer service benchmark report
- Key findings and take aways from new customer service study
- 12 customer service influencers share their insights about the new study
To create loyal and happy customers, we have to deliver excellent customer service.
In fact, research has found that 60% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.
And here lies something interesting.
In a 2005 study titled “Closing the delivery gap”, Bain & Company found that 80% of companies believe they are delivering a superior service. And yet, only 8% of customers believe that they are receiving excellent service – meaning that there are many businesses out there that believe the service they provide to their customers is better than they think.
With that in mind, we wanted to identify how many businesses actually deliver excellent service.
Customer Service Benchmark Report
The Customer Service Benchmark report, is a study of how 1,000 companies handle customer support. The report, which is 25 pages of customer support insight, took several months to complete, and is now available.
When you read the customer service benchmark report, you will learn:
- How companies compare to each other in customer service
- How companies manage and respond to customer support requests
- What others can learn from "best in class" companies
Answering customer emails is a good sign of how companies manage customer support. To keep the study simple, we sent one customer service email template to each of the 1,000 companies with two questions. Based on the speed, quality and tone, we scored each response out of 100, where 1 is poor and 100 is excellent.
Key findings
The study shows several alarming trends based on the response of 1,000 companies and a list of best practices based on the top performers.
Here are the key findings:
- 62% of companies do not respond to customer service emails (Tweet this!)
- 90% of companies do not acknowledge or inform the customer that an email has been received (Tweet this!)
- 97% of companies do not send a follow up email to customers to see if they are satisfied with the response (Tweet this!)
- Only 20% of companies are able to answer questions in full on the first reply (Tweet this!)
- The average response time to handle a customer service request is 12 hours and 10 minutes (Tweet this!)
The research shows that a majority of the 1,000 companies in the study are failing to meet customer expectations and costing millions of dollars in lost customers and unnecessary internal follow-up work.
Here's what customer service experts Shep Hyken, Adam Toporek, Chad Armel, Katharine Giovanni, Jeff Toister, Jeanne Bliss, Jeremy Watkin, Erica Marois, Eric de Haan, Arnout Hellemans, Jan Willem Alphenaar and Leslie O'Flahavan had to say about the report:
Conclusion
Delivering excellent service to your customers isn’t rocket science.
In fact, based on what we have learned from the study, it looks simple. So download the report to learn about the strategies you should be using to improve the quality of service you provide.
Once you finish reading the report, you will be armed with the knowledge to make improvements to your own customer service department and then use the lessons we've shared to create a one of a kind “best in class” support team to help keep more customers.
Note: This is the third annual customer service benchmark report published by SuperOffice. The first report analyzed 250 companies. The second report analyzed 500 companies. In this report, we analyzed 1,000 companies.
