LiveChat has published the results of their fourth annual Customer Service Report.
The numbers presented indicate that companies are following almost the same path adopted a few years ago, and it’s rather bad news.
This was another year in a row when customer satisfaction for live chat app conversations dropped. The companies featured in the report scored 82.26 on a 100-point scale, a slide of 1.5 percent from 2017. From the 19 industries covered by this report, only 4 rated higher, LiveChat’s analytics team said.
This year’s Customer Service Report is based on data gathered from 25,000 companies representing 19 industries from 150 countries. LiveChat’s team analysed 47.4 billion website visits, 437 million chats and 21 million tickets to produce the insights.
The Report’s results confirm, for the third year in a row, that the demand for live chat has kept growing. Even though the number of analyzed companies grew by over 20% year on year, the average number of chats they handle remains at a steady average of around 1000 per month.
Szymon Klimczak, CMO at LiveChat, commented:
‘Customers are eager to use chat for contacting brands online. However, they’re becoming less happy with the quality of these conversations. The pain point is mainly the fact that although chat initiates contact with the company, the issue often isn’t solved within a single conversation.’
Szymon added:
‘In the age of automatization, bots and voice assistants’ short first response time no longer impresses the user. Consumers have more clearly defined goals so they’re going to be more discerning about the quality and efficiency of each support experience. This trend for tech companies appears in the report for the third time and, surprisingly, it hasn’t caught on in other industries yet.”
“We believe that great communication with the customer comes not only from knowledge but also from making the right use of integrations between tools. Tech companies are naturally more advanced in managing their technology. They gather information about the customer from multiple sources and collect them in a single place. This way communication becomes easier to handle, no matter where the customer has come from.’
The top and bottom performing industries in the customer satisfaction category remain the same this year. The software industry had a customer satisfaction rate of 90.6% (90.69% in 2017) and Web Hosting had 89.2% (89.64% in 2017). They weren’t the fastest in first response time and the handle time rankings, but they’ve made their customers the happiest by solving their issues in one touchpoint.
At the other end of the ranking, the worst customer satisfaction rate was experienced by the Travel Industry (75%) and the Games and Gambling industry (77%). When it comes to the size of the company, the lowest customer satisfaction rate was noticed across medium-sized companies (10-99 employees).
The takeaway message from the report is that companies should focus more on differentiating customer service and on the quality of the communication. Nowadays, we’re observing much deeper intelligence and connectivity in the conversational space. With the advancement of technology, customer expectations are increasing and this trend will not change. What’s more, it’s going to be even deeper with the increasing popularity of natural language interfaces or video and voice chats.
Others key highlights from the 2019 Customer Service Report
The end of the year is still the busiest time
During the last quarter of the year, the biggest increases in chat numbers were noticed in Games and Gambling (avg. 8.3 million chats monthly), Retail (avg. 2.1 million chats monthly), and Entertainment (avg. 1.8 million chats monthly).
The summer months start to heat things up
The Education industry is, in large part, responsible for the increase in the number of chats in the summertime. The team noticed that this rose from May until October. It may be related to the end of the semester and the application process that happens in colleges and universities at that time.
The happiest customers are in the Philippines and Thailand
In 2018, the Philippines and Thailand overtook Australia which had been leading the ranking for three years. The Philippines scored 91.71% and Thailand 89.39% for customer satisfaction.
LiveChat has been publishing its customer service analysis since 2015. The aim of these reports is to indicate live chat trends and allow companies to stay up-to-date on the overall customer service metrics that matter for their businesses.
