{"id":67472,"date":"2014-09-06T10:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-06T08:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=67472"},"modified":"2014-09-05T17:35:07","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T15:35:07","slug":"customer-service-is-more-than-please-and-thank-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/trending\/67472\/customer-service-is-more-than-please-and-thank-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Customer service is more than please and thank you"},"content":{"rendered":"

Polite customer service agents do little to satisfy customers, but polite customers are more likely to feel satisfied, new data shows.<\/p>\n

The Zendesk customer satisfaction benchmark shows that global customer satisfaction has increased to 83% in the second quarter of 2014.<\/p>\n

The benchmark is based on customer service and support interactions from more than 25,000 companies, across 140 countries.<\/p>\n

It measures key metrics around customer support efficiency, customer self-service behavior, and levels of customer engagement,and provides insight into how certain indicators influence the outcome of customer-company interactions.<\/p>\n

According to the group’s data, New Zealand has the most satisfied customers in the world, with 93% of tracked responses indicating a happy conclusion to queries.<\/p>\n

On the opposite end of the spectrum, India ranked as the country with the least satisfied customers, with only 58% of customers feeling satisfied.<\/p>\n

Of the 32 countries ranked by Zendesk, South Africa places 19th overall, with a satisfaction rate of 84%.<\/p>\n

Top 10 most satisfied customer countries<\/h3>\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
#<\/strong><\/td>\nCountry<\/strong><\/td>\nSatisfaction rate
\n<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1<\/td>\nNew Zealand<\/td>\n93%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2<\/td>\nCanada<\/td>\n92%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
3<\/td>\nNorway<\/td>\n92%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
4<\/td>\nItaly<\/td>\n92%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
5<\/td>\nSwitzerland<\/td>\n90%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
6<\/td>\nSingapore<\/td>\n90%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
7<\/td>\nAustralia<\/td>\n88%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
8<\/td>\nDenmark<\/td>\n88%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
9<\/td>\nMexico<\/td>\n88%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10<\/td>\nCzech Republic<\/td>\n87%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n

Top 10 least satisfied customer countries<\/h3>\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
#<\/strong><\/td>\nCountry<\/strong><\/td>\nSatisfaction rate
\n<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
32<\/td>\nIndia<\/td>\n58%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
31<\/td>\nTurkey<\/td>\n68%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
30<\/td>\nColombia<\/td>\n71%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
29<\/td>\nIreland<\/td>\n76%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
28<\/td>\nSpain<\/td>\n76%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
27<\/td>\nIndonesia<\/td>\n77%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
26<\/td>\nPoland<\/td>\n77%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
25<\/td>\nMalaysia<\/td>\n77%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
24<\/td>\nPhilippines<\/td>\n80%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
23<\/td>\nGermany<\/td>\n80%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n

In terms of the industries, IT services and consultancy companies managed to best deal with customers, with a 94% satisfaction rate. This is followed by Education (93%) and governments and NGOs (93%).<\/p>\n

The Entertainment and gaming industry left most customers dissatisfied (75%), behind social media (78%) and travel and hospitality (82%).’<\/p>\n

Tracking satisfaction<\/h3>\n

Things that impact a level of customer satisfaction are pretty straight forward, according to Zendesk – most notably, response times to queries. However, some indicators are less obvious.<\/p>\n

\"Customer<\/a>

Customer satisfaction vs response time<\/p><\/div>\n

Zendesk’s research shows that the length of queries (and subsequent responses) as well as word usage can provide indications as to levels of customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n

More specifically, longer responses from agents would likely lead to dissatisfied customers – while customers who type massively wordy complaints are less likely to ever be satisfied anyway.<\/p>\n

Data also shows that agents using words such as “sorry”, “please,” and “thank you” in response to queries and problems, and signing off emails with “best wishes”, leads to a bigger drop in customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n

“Our research shows that word choice and word frequency have a direct correlation with customer satisfaction,\u201d said Sam Boonin, vice president of products at Zendesk.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve found there are triggers around the word \u2018sorry\u2019, and when used more than twice, there is a problem brewing. This can be a helpful indicator for companies to know when to escalate a ticket, avoiding an unhappy customer.”<\/p>\n

\"Customer<\/a>

Customer satisfaction vs word use<\/p><\/div>\n

On the other hand, the research indicates that customers who use the phrases \u201cplease,\u201d \u201cthanks,\u201d and \u201cthank you\u201d tend to be more satisfied.<\/p>\n

“Being overbearing, overly stern, or generally rude to support agents is a common strategy for some customers seeking better service. However, the data indicates that customers who are polite tend to submit higher customer satisfaction scores than those who aren\u2019t,” Zendesk said.<\/p>\n

More on customer satisfaction<\/h3>\n

Most satisfied banking customers in SA<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Poor customer service costing SA companies billions<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

How SA ranks for customer service<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Polite customer service agents do little to satisfy customers, but polite customers are more likely to feel satisfied, new data shows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":45815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,7739,8742],"class_list":["post-67472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-headline","tag-satisfaction","tag-zendesk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67482,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67472\/revisions\/67482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}