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A recent Microsoft study showed that 90% of US citizens base a large portion of their loyalty to a brand on customer service, while almost 60% are ready to leave a brand due to poor customer experience. Considering this data, it’s not surprising that more and more companies recognize the importance of providing good customer service for customer retention and company presence, and increase investments in the tools and technologies that can help them provide a 5-star customer experience.
According to Fortune Business Insights report, the customer experience management market worldwide is worth about $11.34 billion in 2022. This is a 12.2 percent year-over-year increase from its value of $10.11 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $32.53 billion by 2029.
Currently, the industries with the largest market share in customer experience management are BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) and retail and consumer goods. Industries like healthcare and telecom and IT are also expected to show moderate growth in the upcoming years – as the adoption of advanced solutions for customer experiences increases.
Even though large enterprises are expected to hold the largest market share, small and medium businesses are also expected to show growth in the upcoming years. As always, the competition will be tough, and customer experience will be one of the things that make or break your business.
And our customer service statistics back it up.
We have gathered findings from more than 20 researches on customer service conducted in the past two years with the aim to help you:
And much more.
For easier navigation, we divided our stats into four areas. Click on the ones you are most interested in to immediately jump to that section.
Let’s get into it.
First, we’ll take a closer look at what most customer service teams look like and which responsibilities of theirs have the most impact on the customers.
Around 60% of our survey respondents shared that their customer support teams have up to 5 people. Only around 10% of businesses we surveyed have more than 10 customer service agents.
PRO TIP: Ideally, as your workload grows, the number of people on your customer support team will too. But businesses might not always be able to increase their headcount, so they search for other strategies to scale customer support processes.
For example, using triage chats on your website to identify the customer’s problem and connect them with the right person to help instead of bouncing them from one customer support agent to another. This saves time for your customer support team and improves customer experience for the client.
Another idea is to hire customer support reps across time zones other than your usual business hours. That way, you will have one customer service agent replace another and cover 24 hours per day. Part-time help can reduce your response time and free up the time for your customer service team managers for high-level tasks.
On average, one support person handles less than 10 tickets per day. Around 18% of participants tackle over 50 tickets daily.
PRO TIP: Depending on the complexity of the ticket, the customer support reps can feel overwhelmed by customer expectations, especially as they try to reduce ticket resolution time. In many cases, questions they receive are easily solved by following a tutorial, without communicating with the customer support agent. This is why self-service can improve your customer support immensely.
Create a knowledge base where your customers will be able to find tutorials and answers to the most common questions. Automate chat support to direct the customers toward the knowledge base: that’s how you’ll reduce your response time and the number of tickets your customer support agents have to tackle during business hours.
Here is an example of our knowledge base that contains everything you need to know about Databox and our features to get started – from managing your data sources, dashboards, and account setting, to frequently asked questions and numerous articles on using your favorite integrations with Databox.
Support teams should have someone to handle more complex or technical tickets. 82.3% of the support pros we talked to said they have a designated team member to handle more demanding tickets.
PRO TIP: Invest in advanced education of your customer support staff. This advanced education can involve two types of training: new tools and soft skills.
When introducing new tools, it’s critical to provide your customer support staff with enough tutorials and training sessions so they can hit the ground running as fast as possible. This way, they’ll make fewer mistakes while getting used to a new product.
As customer support is also about human relationships, your customer support reps should be able to brush up on their communication skills, problem solving, conflict resolution, empathy, and more. This is where soft skills webinars, lectures, and training step in.
What customer success team’s responsibility is the most impactful? According to our respondents, it’s increasing usage and satisfaction of your product, followed by customer support and collecting customer feedback.
PRO TIP: Providing your customer support reps with ongoing product training will help them understand the product and its potential challenges better, which will reduce the number of tickets waiting on escalations. Your customer support reps will also be able to offer higher-quality replies, and, over time, they will also need to consult the manager less and less often.
If you want to measure how successful your customer support reps are in increasing usage and satisfaction with your product, consider tracking Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) as one of your main customer success KPIs. Based on the results, you can build strategies to improve it and take customer support experience to the next level. It’s easier and more affordable to increase the revenue coming from your existing customers as they’re already loyal to your brand, than to acquire new customers.
No matter your role in customer support – agent, manager, or VP – your core focus is to ensure that customers’ issues, complaints, and information requests are always dealt with promptly and efficiently. But to stay on track, you probably have to log into multiple tools and spend hours manually compiling data into a comprehensive report. Now you can quickly monitor and analyze your customer service performance data from HelpScout and Stripe in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our customer support experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring and analyzing your customer service performance and its correlation to churn rate. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in customer service reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your accounts with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Here are a few insightful statistics on customer service tools and assets that help customer support agents deliver great customer experience.
About 2 in 3 companies we surveyed use chat software, so it’s no surprise that chat is one of two leading customer support channels. Chatbots are undoubtedly one of the best ways to use AI to improve your customer experience as they reduce the wait time for your customers and helps solve simple issues, which decreases the frustration when they’re facing an issue.
PRO TIP: Small customer support teams can handle their workload if supported by quality tools, such as chat software, ticket/email software, customer feedback software, knowledge base, video conferencing, and more. A versatile tool stack that allows you to automate repetitive tasks and eliminate tedious, manual steps from your processes will help your team tackle more tasks and provide higher quality support.
If you add a chatbot into your tool stack, here’s how to leverage it to the fullest: rely on the stored data to provide a personalized experience for your customers. Base the bot’s replies on your customer’s preferences and personal information gathered during your previous conversations. Not only will this strategy help the chatbot identify and solve the problem faster, but it will also improve your customer’s overall experience.
While almost 70% of SaaS companies we talked to offer a free trial of their product, only about 20% of them offer a free version of their product.
PRO TIP: Free trials lead to a great opportunity to offer discounts on current plans or free upgrades to the next one. To incentivize potential customers to sign up for the trial and continue using the product, you can:
For about 40% of the companies, SEO/content marketing is the channel with the lowest CAC, while the second-best performing channel is email marketing, followed by referrals and social media marketing.
PRO TIP: A value-packed FAQ center is certainly handy for your customer support agents, as they can easily direct customers there for answers to simple questions.
However, your SEO and content strategy should also support these efforts and provide plenty of middle-of-the-funnel how-to content that the customer support agents can also use to provide more value in their replies. Consider creating videos with tips and best practices for using your product.
PQLs are the most qualified leads for just shy of 50% of companies we talked to. Next on the list are SQLs, while MQLs were voted by only 16.1% of respondents.
PRO TIP: A customer who signs up for a free trial and is left on their own to figure out how the product works is less likely to transition to the paid version once the trial is over. They might miss an important feature that could tip the scale in your favor in their decision making process.
To increase customer satisfaction and build rapport from the start, devote time and effort to your free trial users as if they already became customers. Provide the free trial user with several ways to reach out if they have questions. If you create a great onboarding experience with your prospects and help them explore the features and benefits of your product and your company in full, you can win them over more easily.
How does your brand communicate with the customers? We’re sharing valuable statistics on customer service communication, customer research, and more.
Companies recognize the importance of customer research: 60% of surveyed companies find it critically important. When it comes to research frequency, companies are performing research regularly – most of them do it at least once a quarter.
PRO TIP: Leverage social media to learn more about your customers without even needing to ask them directly. Twitter Analytics, for example, can help you discover topics that resonate with your audience, while the performance of your posts on other social media platforms can give you valuable insight into your audience’s interests.
This is also where cross-team collaboration is crucial: encourage customer support, sales, and marketing teams to meet at least once a month or share interesting data and insights that will help everyone improve their strategies and tackle the customer pain points better.
For most companies with an average LTV per customer under $5,000, the leading channel to prompt customers to buy more is email. For companies with an average LTV per customer over $5,000, the leading way to upsell is by call.
PRO TIP: Bundle relevant products to upsell with more success. Similarly to cross-selling, you can build groups of products that complement each other and offer a better price than the products’ individual prices put together, which makes this strategy a win-win.
Good understanding of your customers will help you bundle the right products or services. For example, if you have marketing and sales tools like HubSpot, you may offer them as a bundle, because many businesses need both. If you offer payroll software, you can bundle it with accounting or HR functions.
Content (organic SEO) remains the most effective channel for reaching target customers (almost 80% of survey respondents), followed by social media and email (about 50%).
PRO TIP: Monitor your target keywords related to your services, industry, and competitors, to find out where your audience spends time online. When you discover forums, comparison pages, and online communities made of your ideal customers, it’ll be like a goldmine of inspiration for your content.
Companies often see qualified leads coming from Quora or Reddit, so devote a portion of your time to answering industry-relevant questions in these communities. It will help you establish yourself as a knowledge leader people will reach out when they have a problem or are interested in products and services in your niche.
Companies survey their customers – and they usually do it about 2 days to 2 weeks after purchase. Only a small percentage of survey respondents claim they conduct surveys before or immediately after the purchase.
PRO TIP: Ask your customers to rate their latest experience with your brand both in numbers and words. The numbers will help you identify your net promoters and detractors, and understand what customers love or dislike about your service. Make sure to skip multiple choice answers and let the customers use their own words to describe the experience.
If the experience was good, you can use the testimonials for marketing purposes. If the experience was disappointing, the user might see the survey as a chance to vent instead of doing it on social media and you get a chance to communicate with them directly and see how you can fix the problem.
When it comes to website or app communication, for more than half of companies we have surveyed, the top priority is generating leads.
PRO TIP: Even when you use bots on your website, the conversation with your customer shouldn’t sound robotic or be too vague. You can improve the live chat experience a lot by customizing chat prompts by page and tracking user behavior to improve the relevance of your messages towards qualified visitors.
Paying attention to the type of language your chatbots use will also help keep the conversation more human-like. For example, you should avoid using negative language (such as never, terrible, no way, etc.) and focus on motivating and encouraging the customer by using positive and affirmative language (absolutely, great, certainly, assure, etc.)
Reporting is an excellent tool for identifying weak points of your customer service and learning how you can improve your customer retention rates.
2 in 3 companies use customer data to identify areas for improvement or expansion. Other common responses include improving the personalization of messaging and content, and understanding of the audience.
PRO TIP: Use customer data to identify patterns in user behavior, so you can target potential customers more successfully.
Predictive analysis can help sales teams learn more about how who’s using their product and how, allowing the sales and customer support reps to pick the best time and way to follow up with leads.
Tracking and analyzing customer data also allows you to create personalized offers (for bigger clients, for example), run personalized email marketing campaigns, and create loyalty programs that will increase your customer lifetime value and boost your revenue.
Our contributors selected loyal customer rate, CLV, repeat purchase ratio and customer churn as the most important metrics for measuring customer retention.
PRO TIP: As it’s more affordable to retain customers than acquire new ones, monitoring customer retention rates can be key to increasing revenue and growing your business. If a customers doesn’t re-sign up for your service or doesn’t purchase from you again, it’s important to discover whether they simple don’t need the service anymore, or there’s a bottleneck in your processes that you could fix.
Some of the most common reasons for customer churn include: inability to get in touch with the operator, complicated checkout, lack of online presence, lack of proper onboarding… These can be your starting point, but don’t forget to look at your product itself and your competitors, too.
About half of our respondents use a single type of customer service report (mostly Customer Support KPI report or CSAT report). The other half of them use more than one type of customer service report.
PRO TIP: Use customer service reports as tools to provide quality feedback to customer service agents and make report reviews the regular part of your processes. By allowing your customer support staff to monitor their own progress, you will help them see if they’re falling short of their goals and by how much, and identify ways to improve their performance.
Reports can also:
For companies we surveyed, the top 3 benefits of customer service reports are:
PRO TIP: Qualitative assessment is just as important as quantitative.
Rely on the data from your reports, but also make sure to speak to your customer support agents to get the whole picture. The numbers are important, but you can never know what’s behind a successful ticket resolution or customer complaint unless you speak to your team.
One-on-one meetings between managers and customer support reps will help identify problems in an early phase and help resolve them quickly.
Almost half of the surveyed companies monitor their customer support metrics at least once a week, while around 30% of businesses do it monthly. A small percentage of respondents claim they don’t monitor customer service metrics at all.
PRO TIP: Don’t go overboard with monitoring frequency and the number of metrics you track.
Weekly and monthly monitoring works for most companies, especially if you create comparison charts that allow you to track improvements and declines in your performance. For example, if you measure ticket volume and the number of tickets suddenly increased compared to the previous week, there might be a product issue that needs addressing.
Regarding KPIs, measuring a few most relevant ones will allow you to understand your performance rather than create confusion. Pick three to five critical metrics and automate the reporting process by having the numbers emailed to you once a week.
When setting customer service goals, most companies (79.4% of them) monitor CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), 59.4% of surveyed companies track First Response Time (FRT), and 50% monitor First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR).
PRO TIP: Before setting customer service goals, consider the most impactful factors that might affect the way you think about your objectives.
For example, review your chat history to identify common customer challenges and talk to your customer support agents to identify what’s the biggest obstacle for them in their daily activities and ticket resolution. Do your customer agents lack time to tackle all the tickets? Do they need more product training to provide better replies? Do they need help to handle demanding customers?
The answers to these questions will turn you in the right direction when setting goals for the next quarter.
Insight reports are very beneficial for the vast majority of companies we talked to, and the team that benefits most from having a properly developed customer insight report is the Marketing team (followed by the Sales team).
PRO TIP: When creating customer insight reports, make sure to include metrics that will be helpful for both marketing and sales teams, such as customer churn rate, customer lifetime value, social media feedback, net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, search volume, etc.
Based on the insights from customer reports, marketing and sales staff will be able to create content and campaign that push the right pain points and offer attractive solutions to the target market. At the same time, the sales team can work on their closing techniques and come up with new sales call scripts to ensure closing more deals.
Saying ‘thank you’ for a 5-star review is easy. Mitigating the consequences after a disappointed customer reaches out isn’t. Customer service reps have a demanding job, so why not make it easier? The right tools will do the trick.
Especially if you opt for Databox.
Databox is an easy-to-use dashboard reporting tool with over 70 one-click integrations with the most popular sales, marketing, project management, analytics, and CRM tools. Our library contains hundreds of pre-made templates that can save hours of your time, while allowing you to customize the dashboard to fit your needs. You can easily track all your important metrics in one place, pulling the data from the sources you choose, in real-time, in a visually appealing and streamlined manner. These dashboards are also incredibly easy to share with your manager, clients, or peers.
We designed Databox to make your job easier. Care to learn more details? Create a free account and streamline your reporting processes today.
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Marketing Research Analyst at Databox. Being an experienced Strategic and Creative Planner, with more than 15 years of practice, Nevena is passionately dedicated to untying the knots and entanglements of marketing, sales, and human behavior in order to deliver understandable, useful, and actionable insights for businesses.
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