Dive Brief:
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Customer satisfaction with retailers dropped 6% for the 2013 holiday season, even worse than last year’s drop of 2% in the same quarter 2012, according to a benchmark study released Monday by Zendesk, a customer service consulting company based in San Francisco.
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In general, the poor numbers were likely due to understaffing, the report said.
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The report also highlighted examples of Zendesk clients that did well in customer satisfaction, showing that they responded to customer demand for shipping and transaction updates in one case, and excellent customer communications via telephone in the other.
Dive Insight:
These quarterly Zendesk benchmarking reports are fairly detailed, with customer satisfaction numbers for retail and other industries in 20 countries. Retailers should take heed of the report’s general conclusion — that customer satisfaction fell in 2013 over 2012 because retailers were understaffed and unprepared for the demand that occurred in the fourth quarter this year. In post-holiday postmortems, we’ve been hearing about how hard it was to get shoppers into stores, and how heavy discounts were necessary to make sales happen. But this report shows that better attention to customer service is needed, and, if it improves, perhaps that could also help the bottom line.