Zendesk Benchmark: Live Chat Drives Highest Customer Satisfaction of all Service Channels (Germany)

June 8, 2015

Exchanging more messages during a Live Chat linked to higher customer satisfaction

BERLIN, GERMANY — May 26, 2015 — Live Chat proves to be the service channel driving the highest customer satisfaction, according to the findings of the latest quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report for the first quarter 2015. Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform. 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.

92 per cent of all customers worldwide are satisfied with customer services via Live Chat. However, the average satisfaction of customer service via web forms and email is only 85 per cent. Twitter comes in last with only 77 per cent satisfied customers.

“Customers are gravitating more towards Live Chat as their preferred channel,” said Steffen Teske, Director Central & Eastern Europe at Zendesk. “Compared to ordinary web forms, organizations who use live chat can provide much quicker and direct service for example via the customers smartphones.”

We get excellent service-ratings from our clients on a regular basis. Amongst other things, the personal contact through live chat is the reason for that“, says Jörg Klaas, managing director at Secova, as a provider of professional documentation and training systems. „Live Chat enables our service agents to answer customer queries much faster because they don’t have to waste time looking for the right contact person, which is often the case for email requests. Waiting loops are now a thing of the past, but also email exchange and the number of tickets per day decreases because you can answer several questions in just one chat conversation.“ Secova is one of the first companies to use Zopim Premium live chat by Zendesk.

Another finding shows that customer satisfaction increases as the number of chat messages exchanged increases. One possible reason for this is that customers are happier with agents who are more engaged in the customer support process.

Other Key Findings:

• The most popular time to live chat an agent is 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 is also an important factor. German companies have to catch up here as they reveal the slowest first reply compared to all other countries. Also the amount of a customer service agent’s chat workload is important for the actual customer satisfaction.

• Agents using live chat in Mexico have the most chat conversations — managing the highest volume of chats. In comparison, Germany is way behind and only Italy receives less customer requests via live chat.

• Agents in Germany keep things relatively fast with the average messages exchanged during a Live Chat conversation of 8.5 and the total duration of 642 seconds. Therefore, Germany takes a midfield position compared to other countries.

• German service agents cover 44 chat conversations per month with an average first reply time of 128 seconds.

Please find the complete Benchmark report under:

https://www.zendesk.com/resources/customer-service-benchmark/

Global Customer Satisfaction Rises

As with previous reports, the Zendesk Benchmark also examines overall customer satisfaction by country and industry. Global customer satisfaction in the first quarter of 2015 lifted slightly by 0.3 per cent to 95 percent. In country news, Philippines, Indonesia, and Colombia posted the greatest gains to customer satisfaction, while New Zealand and Belgium still are the top two customer satisfaction leaders. Canada bumped out Ireland for the third place spot, and Germany stays in the midfield with a 1.3 percent higher customer satisfaction up to 92.9 per cent.

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