Zendesk Launches Net Promoter Score® Surveys and Unveils Customer Loyalty Trends

October 21, 2014

New Survey Allows Proactive Measurement of the Health of Customer Relationships; Initial Results Show Strong Link between Customer Service Experiences and Willingness to Recommend Organizations

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — October 22, 2014 — Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today launched its built-in Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys, allowing organizations to measure customer loyalty and gather insights to improve their long-term customer relationships. With NPS surveys, Zendesk enables organizations to proactively gather and analyze customer feedback directly from the same customer service platform they use to support and interact with customers. The company also released findings in its third quarter 2014 Zendesk Benchmark report that highlights the impact of customer service experiences on NPS results and, ultimately, the willingness of customers to promote an organization.

NPS surveys ask the simple question: “How likely are you to recommend the company to someone you know?” Customers can answer on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being “not at all likely” and 10 being “extremely likely.” The resulting score ranges from negative 100 to positive 100 and is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (scores of 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (9-10). NPS proactively measures the loyalty of a company’s customers over time, while customer satisfaction surveys are typically sent after a customer service interaction to reactively measure whether a specific interaction was good or bad.

“Customer feedback should not be an afterthought; it should be integrated into a company’s ongoing engagement with its customers,” said Sam Boonin, vice president of product marketing at Zendesk. “NPS surveys in Zendesk give organizations a way to regularly gauge the long-term health of their customer relationships, all from the same platform they already use to interact with their customers.”

Because Zendesk integrates NPS surveys within the same platform used to provide customer service, customers’ NPS rating and comments are automatically displayed on their user profiles in Zendesk. Customer service teams know if individual customers are promoters or detractors as they interact with them and can tailor conversations to better fit the sentiment of customers — and improve customer loyalty over time.

Zendesk Benchmark: Customer Service Experiences Impact NPS

In addition to NPS surveys becoming generally available in Zendesk, the latest quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report examined 103,000 NPS survey responses from 230 companies that had been piloting the survey feature. The results showed that customer service is a key driver of a customer’s NPS rating.

As part of the NPS survey, customers can leave written, open-ended feedback. In analyzing that feedback, the topics most-often cited for a high or low NPS score was the quality of the customer service that customers received:

Other key findings from the NPS report include:

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  Customers want to be heard: Customers are twice as likely to leave written comments on NPS surveys (53 percent) as they are on customer satisfaction surveys. While promoters leave shorter comments, such as “you’re the best,” detractors tend to leave much longer, more-detailed responses that offer valuable proactive feedback for organizations. Seventy-five percent of detractor comments contain more than 50 words.
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  Influence of past service experiences: Customers who previously gave good satisfaction ratings for past customer service experiences were more likely to be promoters on NPS surveys (62.3 percent), while only 17.2 percent who left bad satisfaction ratings also were promoters.
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  Extremes rule: The majority of customer responses, 54 percent, leave either the highest rating of 10 or the lowest rating of 0 on NPS surveys. Ratings of 10 are the most common overall accounting for 44 percent of responses.

As with previous reports, the Zendesk Benchmark also examines customer satisfaction by country and industry, focused on the largest increases and decreases during the quarter. In industry news, travel, web hosting, and entertainment & gaming were the most improved industries. In country news, Peru, Argentina, and Italy were the movers and shakers with the biggest gains in customer satisfaction from previous quarter.

For the full Benchmark report, industry and country ratings, and details on the research methodology, visit: www.zendeskbenchmark.com

About the Zendesk Benchmark

The Zendesk Benchmark is based on actual customer interactions between 25,000 participating organizations and their customers across 140 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, it must have a minimum of 10,000 responses during the quarter. The NPS data is drawn from customers that piloted the Zendesk NPS survey feature. The initial findings are based on 103,000 responses to NPS surveys sent by 230 companies. A company must have received a minimum of 20 ratings from their customers to be included.

About Zendesk

Zendesk provides a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. With more than 45,000 customer accounts, Zendesk is used by organizations in 140 countries 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

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.