2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support

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SupportIndustry.com Research Results: 2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support

Executive Summary
Customer support centers generally represent an organization's face to the customer. Its service reputation is one of the key drivers of an organization's brand, public reputation, and market share. But when you look at the field's literature and conferences, what you often find is a world that revolves around ACDs, IVRs, first-call resolution rates, and staffing algorithms – and not always its core reality of serving people, which directly affects retention rates, net promoter scores, and upsell/cross-sell …ver más…

Even more impressively, the 35.8% of customers who are "frustrated" or "very frustrated" before a support transaction drops to a very modest 7.6% afterward.

Figure 1. Average frustration level of customers at the beginning and end of a session.

Translating this to a more popular support metric (i.e., customer satisfaction levels), we see guarded optimism overall. A little over a third (34.2%) rate their average customer satisfaction at over 90%, with nearly half of these rating an impressive 95% or more. Less than 15% rate customer satisfaction levels as less than 80%, and fewer than half of these respondents report customer satisfaction as being below 70%. Perhaps even more telling, however, over a third of respondents either do not measure or didn't report their customer satisfaction levels; in fact, only 38.7% of respondents give their customers an opportunity to fill out a survey following a transaction.

Figure 2. Average customer satisfaction levels over the past year.

While these kinds of results compare well with other services – for example, according to Consumer Reports, only 53% of people are "very satisfied" with the service at their automobile dealer1 – they still point to room for
1

Ransom, K., "Consumer Reports Repair Shop Satisfaction Survey," AOL Autos, June 23, 2008,