Happy and satisfied customers are a crucial part of business success, as these customers are more likely to continue with your company for years to come.

On the other hand, one unsatisfied customer can share his opinion through social media and the web and can negatively affect your business almost overnight.

There’s no question that good customer service can have an impact on your business.

Yet research shows that while 80% of businesses believe they provide excellent customer service, in fact only 8% of customers believe they are actually receiving excellent service.

To be honest, we were a little surprised by the data and so we set out on our own quest to see if this research actually held true. The result of this journey is the 2018 Customer Service Benchmark report.

Customer Service Benchmark Report

Today we’re excited to release our new study: The 2018 Customer Service Benchmark Report, which 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 for you to read.

The report explores three areas:

• How the companies compare to each other in customer service
• How the companies manage and respond to customer support requests •
• What we can learn from “best in class” companies

Methodology

We analyzed the customer service quality of 1,000 companies across the world.

The 1,000 companies included a mix of both small and large organizations.

To keep the study simple, we sent one email to each company. Based on the speed, quality, and tone, we then scored each response out of 100, where 1 is poor and 100 is excellent. The responses were based on the following categories:

• Was the contact information easy to find?
• Did the company acknowledge the support request? • How long did it take for the company to respond?
• Were both questions answered in the first reply?
• Did the company follow up to see if we were happy with the level of support?

From these five questions, we created an “overall” score to identify best-in-class customer support teams.

Key Findings

This report was created to identify how companies handle customer support.

Before the study, we assumed that customer service is a priority for all companies, that smaller companies would manage customer service better, and that all companies would respond quickly to customer service requests.

While we were conducting our study, we uncovered some statistics that were contrary to what we believed in.

The study found that:

• 62% of companies do not respond to customer service emails
• 90% of companies do not acknowledge or inform the customer that an email has been received
• 97% of companies do not follow up with customers to see if they are satisfied with the response
• Only 20% of companies are able to answer questions in the first reply
• The average response time to handle a customer service request is 12 hours and 10 minutes

The research shows that a majority of the 500 companies in the study are failing to meet customer expectations and costing millions of dollars in lost customers and unnecessary internal follow-up work.

You can read the full report here

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. And once you finish reading the report, you have 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” customer service team to help keep more customers.