customer
service report 2017
Customer service trends
that will shape 2017
01Introduction
This report aims to bring business owners and customer service decision makers up to speed on the latest customer service trends.
By looking at the customer service data from 2015 and 2016, we can find out what are the current customer expectations for customer service and what kind of results you need to have to meet those expectations.
Using the data and conclusions from this report, you will be able to plan your customer service goals and priorities for 2017.
02About the data
This customer service report is based on data gathered over two years: 24 months from December 2014 to November 2016. We gathered the data from over 13.5k companies representing 22 industries using live chat and tickets for customer service and online sales.
All in all, the report is based on 24 billion website visits, 235.7 million chats and 11.1 million tickets.
03Main customer service metrics
Customer satisfaction
The global benchmark for customer satisfaction you should be aiming at. It remained relatively unchanged in 2016. The slight dip can be attributed to the growing data set.
First response time
An average business keeps speeding its response time up. If you don’t want to fall behind, you should make sure that agents are responding to customer questions as fast as possible.
Handle time
The amount of time it takes to help a customer over chat remains more or less unchanged. You should focus on closing cases in one touch, even if it results in a longer handle time.
Number of cases
The average number of chats (924) and tickets (48) a typical business gets over the course of a month show that customers are using online customer service more often. Since most tickets come from cases not handled in one touch, there’s still room for improvement.
04Key findings
- Demand for live chat grew by 43.41%
- This means businesses noticed a 3.27% average uptick in the number of chats with customers.
- Summers are slow and the Holidays busy for live chat
- June saw the smallest growth in the number of chats: only 33.72% more chats on average. November saw the biggest jump of 53.74% for an average company.
- Still a lot of room for growth
- Considering the quickly increasing number of ticket cases, which went up by an average of 86.29% last year, there’s a lot of potential for solving those cases in real time via chats.
- Tech companies the best with up to 92.91% customer satisfaction
- Last year, tech businesses saw the best customer satisfaction results: Software with 91.17%, IT with 92.66% and Web Hosting with 92.91%, which makes web hosting businesses the highest rated industry in 2016.
- Faster response time is a big part of the success formula
- Out of the 12 industries that improved customer satisfaction in 2016, 9 of them sped up their first response time.
- Reply quickly and close cases in one touch for best results
- The best-performing companies kept their reply time below 1 minute and also handled cases in one touch, even if it leads to longer chat times, up to 17m 32s.
- Games & Gambling, Media & Telecom companies were the fastest
- The Games and Gambling industry is the current leader in response time, with agents responding within 37 seconds on average. Media and Telecom companies lead in the shortest handle time, with an average case taking 10m 18s.
- Australian companies win in customer satisfaction
- Australia takes the gold in customer satisfaction in 2016 with 91.35% average satisfaction score as one of the biggest countries in terms of the number of chats.
- US companies closing on 91% customer satisfaction
- US-based companies improved on their 2015 score with an average result of 90.84% for over 23.6 million chats.
- SMBs provide quick reply but can’t handle all cases
- Businesses with 1-9 and 10-49 employees were able to keep response time below one minute. However, they also had the biggest number of ticket cases (1.5-1.6 million), which suggests that a lot of cases are not resolved immediately.
- Enterprise businesses lead in satisfaction
- Larger and more experienced businesses were able to get above-average customer satisfaction with 86.40%-88.82% scores.
- B2B and internal audiences get the best customer service
- Companies catering to business and internal audiences have significantly improved their customer satisfaction and offer a truly professional support: businesses catering to both B2B & internal audiences with 91.79% customer satisfaction and companies with B2B, B2C & Internal audiences with 93.42% customer satisfaction.
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05The use of live chat in online customer service
5.01Growing demand for live chat
The demand for live chat keeps growing steadily year over year. When looking at the number of chats an average business had per month in 2016, we can see a 3.27% increase when compared to the previous year. This comes up to 924 chats on average per month.
Kate Leggett Customer Service Expert,
Customer Relationship Management at Forrester
Live chat is the go-to channel for customers
Chat as a communication channel is growing because it provides a low-friction way to interact with an agent.
Chat offers many benefits to the customer: Organizations can quickly connect customers to an agent with the right skills to answer the question without them having to navigate an arduous interactive voice response (IVR), they can succinctly resolve questions in near-real time, and agents can leverage customer behavior on the website to move the conversation forward instead of rediscovering information that has already been communicated to the customer.
In a customer service scenario, chat leads to shorter contact resolution times, and improves the customer experience, influencing customer loyalty and retention. In a pre-sale scenario, chat can help answer questions to drive higher rates of purchase and engagement, increasing average customer lifetime value.
When looking at all the chats we monitored for this customer service report, the trend grows even higher. Out of all chats that were taken into account for this report, there’s a 43.41% increase in the use of live chat when compared to 2015. When we compensate for the growth in the number of the companies using live chat, the overall average increase in chats came up to 4.11% for a typical company in 2016.
An average business had 4.11% more chats in 2016 and will have even more in 2017.
What is the growth going to look like in 2017? The growing number of tickets seems to show that not all cases are handled right away. There are two main ways to get tickets: an agent creates a ticket when they can’t solve a case on the spot or a ticket is created when a customer leaves a message and there is nobody to answer it.
Fig. Businesses participating in the customer service report had 42 million chats more than last year.
When looking at the overall use of tickets, which went up by 86.29% in 2016, it would seem that many businesses can’t deal with the demand for real-time contact and either have to save cases for later (creating tickets manually) or receive a lot of tickets when their agents are not online (after-hours messages as tickets). Even if we look at the average monthly per business data, the use of tickets grew by 31.15%, which is way faster than that of chats.
Customers want to have more access to live chat. By making chat available for longer, companies should be able to cut down on the number of tickets they get, to convert those tickets into real-time chats and to close cases in one touch. According to Shep Hyken, the popularity of live chat comes from how comfortable customers are when using it and we can expect more of that thanks to advances in AI and chatbots:
Shep Hyken Customer Service Expert,
New York Times bestselling author
Chatbots and AI will help you handle even more chats
Live chat is a channel that’s very comfortable for customers. They accept it, it’s quick, they typically aren’t waiting on hold like when they are making a phone call so they are happy to use this medium. I think all stats and facts are pointing to high acceptance of using live chat. People have also started recognizing that live chat is often a chatbot and not a human being.
I think we’re starting to see a seamless transition between a machine live chat into human conversation when the chatbot recognizes that the customer is confused or the answer that the chatbot gave is not acceptable. That customer can be transferred to a person and either continue the chat or start a phone call.
That said, customers are still learning that this is a great way to connect with a company. It’s sometimes a matter of the company being a little bit more aggressive in making sure that that customers are aware of this channel. To help with that, they can put it right in front of the website, they can push and promote it on other channels.
5.02Live chat highs and lows
When looking closer at the monthly data, we found two periods that skewed the trend quite a bit: the slow summer period and the busy Holiday Sales Season period.
Fig. June saw the lowest growth and November the highest.
In June, the increase in the number of chats fell down to 36.72%. It would seem that summer is quite a bit slower than the rest of the year and, depending on your industry, you may not need as many agents online as in other months.
You can expect up to 53.74% more chats in November, during the Holiday Shopping Season.
In November, when the Holiday Sales Season kicks in, there was a big spike in the number of chats. On average, you could expect around 53.74% more chats during that period because of all the potential customers shopping for deals and holiday gifts. This is true especially for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday dates, which see the biggest increase in the number of cases.
Want to learn more about customer service during the Holiday Season? Read our Ecommerce during the Holiday Shopping Season report! The ecommerce report shows how ecommerce businesses can maximize their holiday shopping earnings while keeping customer service level high.
READ THE REPORTWhat’s important to note it’s that you can’t just ‘sign out’ of your live chat when January or February rolls in. All the gifts you sold will find their recipients by then and you can expect a new wave of users wanting to figure out the details of using your product:
Shep Hyken Customer Service Expert,
New York Times bestselling author
Helping new users after Holiday Sales
If interactions between companies are highest when customer are buying at the Black Friday and Cyber Monday level, guess what’s going to happen shortly thereafter: you will see a huge amount of issues right after somebody can’t figure out how to turn on their new computer or how to set up a game they just got.
It simply makes sense to prepare for that. And with artificial intelligence and chatbots, it’s no longer about staffing but about making sure your system is able to handle the load of incoming enquiries. I think we’re approaching an age when we’re going to have 24/7 customer service that is really top notch because AI is helping to support that.
06Getting the best customer service results
6.01Tech companies leading the pack
Despite the overall average customer service score not budging a lot, there are industries that seem to have customer satisfaction figured out. In 2016, this seemed to be the tech companies.
Web Hosting businesses lead in customer satisfaction in 2016 with an average satisfaction score of 92.91%.
The IT, Software and Web Hosting industries have seen the best average customer satisfaction scores last year. Software companies open up the list with 91.17% average customer satisfaction. IT businesses follow suit with 92.66%. In 2016, the title of the best-performing industry goes to Web Hosting, which got an average customer satisfaction score of 92.91%. According to Jeff Toister, live chat is perfect for tech companies because it makes customer service, bug fixes and walkthroughs so easy:
Jeff Toister Customer Service Expert,
Founder of Toister Performance Solutions
Live chat is the go-to channel for customers
It doesn’t surprise me to see technology companies leading the way in customer satisfaction. Live chat is a great channel for technical support. It offers customers access to a live person that’s generally faster and more convenient than calling. Chat agents are able to share additional resources like helpful links and screenshots that help customers better understand suggested fixes.
Best of all, the natural latency of a chat conversation gives customers built-in time to implement the steps required to fix their issue. This is a better experience than phone for many customers, where the customer has to complete a process while the agent idly listens.
6.02The Australian companies with the best results
When looking at different markets, we found out that Australian companies rank the highest in average customer satisfaction among the biggest country groups with. The benchmark for customer satisfaction set out by Australian companies sat at 91.35% in 2016.
The 2017 customer satisfaction score to beat for US companies is 90.84%.
The US companies came close to breaking the 91% mark with an average score of 90.84%. This places the US business among the top-rated country groups last year. When it comes to the reason behind this growth, both country groups have sped up their replies despite extending their handle time, allowing for more cases to be resolved within one touch.
6.03Fast response time a big part of success
What’s the secret to great customer service? It looks like fast response time and resolving cases in one touch is the biggest indicator of customer success. Out of the 12 industries that improved their customer satisfaction last year, 9 of them sped up the first response time metric. In 2016, the two fastest industries were Games and Gambling, with an average response time of 37 seconds and Media and Telecom, with an average handle time of 10 minutes and 18 seconds.
Fast replies and handling cases in one-touch are two conditions required for good customer satisfaction.
Even though fast response time seems to be a part of good customer service in most cases, with businesses offering response time below one minute getting the best results, it’s a bit more tricky with handle time. We’ve seen companies that had a similar level of customer satisfaction and different handle times. It would seem, that the handle times is not as important as making sure that the case resolution is painless for the customer. So instead of pushing for shorter/longer handle times, businesses should focus on offering a solution immediately and closing a case in one touch:
Shep Hyken Customer Service Expert,
New York Times bestselling author
Short handle time is not crucial for customer service
When I get on live chat, whether it is a live agent or AI, it doesn’t really matter whether it takes 6 or 12 minutes. If I’m having my question answered and there is little friction between the time I start and the time I get the answer, I will be completely satisfied. Customers don’t want to have to repeat the problem. You want to constantly be moving toward the solution.
When there’s confusion, when the customer has to repeat themselves, that’s when they are going to hit the company negatively on a survey rating. Yes, they may get their answer in the end, but the overall satisfaction is not as good because it took too long!
6.04Company age and customer satisfaction
We made a couple of observations in relation to company size and age and satisfaction ratings for those companies.
First of all, it seems that smaller businesses and start-ups have it easier when it comes to providing quick responses. The relatively small amount of customer questions they get allows them to be fairly quick when it comes to answering new chats. On average, businesses that hire between 1 and 9 employees offered 48 seconds first response time in 2016. In comparison, the bigger the company gets, it gets harder for them to offer a quick answer.
SMBs tend to provide below 1 min replies but enterprise companies get better customer satisfaction results.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, bigger, more established businesses seem to be doing better than small, up-and-coming companies. Among all the businesses we monitored this year, two groups clearly outperformed others: 100-499 employee companies with 88.82% customer satisfaction and 500-999 employee companies with 88.36% customer satisfaction. Even though these businesses can be 7-14 seconds slower when making a reply, they seem to have a better understanding how to make customers happy. This is probably due to using the right tools, good practices or having decision-makers taking active steps to improve customer satisfaction. Additionally, B2B companies also seem to get better results than the B2C ones, with around 91.79%-93.42% better customer satisfaction scores.
Jonny Everett Director of Customer Development
and Co-Founder at The Chat Shop
Strategy and method trumps charm in customer service
Chat satisfaction is one of those customer service metrics that doesn’t just happen with one more smiley. Getting service right requires a clearly defined approach, strong processes to deliver on the approach, formalised reviews for front line agents that take into account key performance criteria and of course, the resource to manage and iterate all of it.
Larger enterprises are used to the approach of never starting anything without a deep understanding of the strategy. Whilst this can make them slow, it normally results in a more rigorous output long term which pays when it comes to customer service metrics that take time, like satisfaction.
The big fellas have the process chops, the quality assurance teams, the formalised review structures and the rest of the infrastructure that’s required to deliver an on-going improvement to service that delivers increased satisfaction. Smaller companies can be scrappier and win on charm, but not much beats an iron clad process as the data shows.
07Conclusions and suggestions for 2017
- Focus on solving customer problems first, offering a quick response second
- Answering customers questions quickly is good, but it’s not good enough if it’s not followed by a resolution. Even if a customer needs to spend more time getting their case handled, it’s acceptable if they get their case resolved in the end. A new metric idea for you to keep track of in 2017: the share of cases successfully resolved in one touch.
- Look to AI to maximize your customer service output in 2017
- The quickly developing AI and chatbot technologies may be just the thing to get on a new level of scaling your customer service. With a bot that is good enough, you can leave the easier and repetitive cases to the machine and have it handle over the more difficult cases to a human. This should allow you to effectively multiply the number of chats you are able to handle at one time.
- Staffing needs change over the course of the year
- The composition of your customer service team shouldn’t be set in stone throughout the course of the year. Staffing for the yearly average will leave you overstaffed during the Summer and understaffed during the Holiday Sales season. A good solution would be to adopt the all-hands-on-deck-support by making sure that people from other departments than customer service can fill in during the busier periods. In the same vein, if there is less traffic than usual, they could attend to other tasks.
- Businesses that offer longer help hours win in 2017
- This is one of the bridges many companies are yet to cross. And it’s puzzling, because it gives you a big advantage over your competition. Being readily available to the customer, no matter when they are contacting you, can easily decide who the customers are going to pick the next time they want to purchase something online. With advances in the chatbot and AI technology, you can expect more companies offering chatbot help after their normal office hours.
- Look to tech companies and big businesses for best customer service practices
- When looking for ways you can improve your own customer service, see what tech companies and big businesses are doing. They seem to have invested a fair bit in making sure that their customer service is top of the line and adapting some of their approaches should bring you closer to their results. Tech companies show the perfect balance between fast replies and cases handled in one touch. When it comes to big companies, they are able to have similar, maybe a bit slower, results but at a huge scale.
Give LiveChat a try
Want to get the same effect in your business? Start 2017 with LiveChat on your website, on your social media or in your apps to convert users into customers over chat. Singup now for free 30-day trial and get 50% off your first payment!
Authors
Jacob Firuta
Jacob writes reports, blog posts and other pieces of content to help businesses offer better support and sales services. You can check his latest articles on the LiveChat Blog and in the Resources section
Filip Jaskólski
Filip is the head of our Developers Program who also loves preparing this kind of reports (this is his third one in a row). Whatever Filip does, you can be sure that it will look really good and work as intended.
Julia Wójcik
Julia makes sure that everything we do looks really good. Sometimes that means creating an amazing graphic for one of our materials. At other times, this means smacking us for over complicating things.
About LiveChat
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The company aims to create products that are simple, easy to use and powerful. Thanks to the quick implementation process, businesses can start using LiveChat within minutes.
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