Zendesk Benchmark: Live Chat Drives Highest Customer Satisfaction

May 20, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — May 20, 2015 — Customers who choose live chat for customer service are satisfied a higher percentage of the time than those who call, email, or use social media channels, according to findings of the quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report released today. The report examines the rising popularity of live chat as a customer service channel.

“Customers are gravitating more towards live chat as their preferred channel,” said Jason Maynard, senior manager of data and analytics at Zendesk. “Organizations who use live chat move customer requests away from web forms and feedback tabs to real-time chat, where questions can be answered directly in the web or mobile experience.”

The quarterly report is produced by Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE:ZEN), a leading cloud-based customer service platform, and is available at http://www.zendeskbenchmark.com/

Another finding shows that customers appear to like a more back-and-forth style of conversation. Specifically — live chat customer satisfaction increases as the number of chat messages exchanged increases. One possible reason: customers are happier with agents who are more engaged in the customer support process — either by asking more troubleshooting questions, or simply taking the time to ask the customer how his or her day is going.

Satisfaction By Channels:

Channel	Satisfaction
Live Chat*	92%
Voice	88%
Web Form	85%
Email	85%
Facebook	84%
Twitter	77%

*Live Chat customer satisfaction is based on a “good” or “bad” rating provided by the customer at the end of the chat. For all other channels, customer satisfaction is based on a “good” or “bad” rating provided through an email survey submitted to the customer after their ticket has been deemed solved.

Other Key Findings:

• The most popular time to live chat an agent? Between 10AM and 3PM local time. More than 50 percent of chats occurred at this time.

• With live chat, organizations who receive tickets via their website have fewer requests submitted through their web forms after adding live chat, showing that many customers prefer to talk in real time when they are using the company website.

• The number of messages exchanged alone doesn’t just impact customer satisfaction, the time to first reply and the size of a customer service agent’s chat workload are also important factors. Although agents can manage multiple conversations at once, they do hit a limit on how many chats they can handle before it hurts customer satisfaction.

• Agents using live chat in Mexico have the most chat conversations — managing the highest volume of chats.

• Agents in Denmark keep things fast and simple — they deliver the swiftest reply times and are the most concise.

• The average benchmark for live chat across all geographies and industries is 62 chat conversations a month; first response time of 1 minute 36 seconds on average; and customer satisfaction of 92%.*

Global Customer Satisfaction Rises

As with previous reports, the Zendesk Benchmark also examines overall customer satisfaction by country and industry, focused on the largest increases and decreases during the quarter. Global customer satisfaction in the first quarter of 2015 lifted slightly to 95 percent. In country news, Philippines, Indonesia, and Colombia posted the greatest gains to customer satisfaction, while New Zealand and Belgium spent their third quarter in a row as the top two customer satisfaction leaders. Canada bumped out Ireland for the third place spot, moving from sixth place last quarter.

Among industries, social media, web hosting, and manufacturing & computer hardware were the most improved. Government & nonprofit, IT services & consultancy, and healthcare continue to occupy the top three positions.

About the Zendesk Benchmark

The research about live chat contained in this report is based on data from 2,261 Zendesk customers who have completed the Zendesk Benchmark survey and are using Zopim Live Chat to provide real-time customer service. To be included, companies must have conducted at least 25 chats in Q1 2015. For findings relating to live chat customer satisfaction, companies must have received at least 25 satisfaction ratings in Q1 2015.

The Zendesk Benchmark is based on actual customer service and support interactions between 25,000 participating organizations and their customers across 150 countries. Introduced in March 2012, it allows organizations to compare their customer service performance against industry peers. It measures key metrics around customer support efficiency, customer self-service behavior, and levels of customer engagement. Customer satisfaction is based on the percentage of positive responses to the question of whether or not a customer was satisfied with a customer service interaction. For a country to be included in the quarterly report on global customer satisfaction, it must have a minimum of 10,000 responses during the quarter.

About Zendesk

Zendesk provides a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. With more than 57,000 paid customer accounts, Zendesk products are used by organizations in 150 countries and territories to provide support in more than 40 languages. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. Learn more at www.zendesk.com

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