Customer satisfaction last quarter: trick or treat?

With the release of the our quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report, we’re very happy to announce that customer satisfaction rose globally for the second consecutive quarter after more than a year in decline. For the third quarter of 2013, the average customer satisfaction rating reached 82 percent, its highest level since the first quarter of 2012.

Despite rising to 83 percent, the U.S. fell short of the top 10, trailing behind countries like Russia, which has historically struggled with customer service but has been steadily rising to break into the top three this quarter. Brazil proved to be another notable emerging market, making the largest percentage gain this quarter (up 10 percentage points). Companies in these fast-growing economies appear to be putting an increased emphasis on delivering better customer service in order to sustain their growth.

What is the Zendesk Benchmark report?
Unlike a survey or expert opinion, the Zendesk Benchmark is based on actual customer service and support interactions from more than 16,000 companies (across 125 countries) that opted to participate. It measures key metrics around customer support efficiency, customer self-service behavior, and levels of customer engagement.

This quarter, we paid special attention to some of the factors affecting customer satisfaction:

• First reply time. The time it takes for a customer to get an initial reply after submitting a ticket has a major impact on that customer’s ultimate satisfaction. We examined first reply time data for patterns, and discovered that the time of day tickets are submitted has a big impact on how quickly the first reply goes out.
• Support channels. We also examined the various channels (email, phone, social media, etc.) customers use to contact companies to find out which ones had the highest customer satisfaction.
• Customer tenure. We looked for a correlation between how long customers have been using Zendesk to interact with a company and customer satisfaction.

Read the Zendesk Benchmark 2013 Q3 report