Three Freaky Facts from Our Customer Satisfaction Index

The following is excerpted from the Customer Satisfaction Index, which you can view here…

A high satisfaction score is the best sign of exemplary customer service. But it begs the question: how do I compare to my peers? For the past year, we’ve gathered anonymized help desk-performance and customer-satisfaction information from more than 15,000 of our customers to create an epic Customer Service Index that tells businesses where they stand. The results surprised us. While businesses of a certain size unexpectedly struggled, surprising industries boomed and an old cliche proved passe.

The Customer Satisfaction Valley (page 9)

Intuition says that customer satisfaction and company size should have a linear relationship, progressing or declining as companies grow. However, between mom-and-pop shops and the nation’s largest companies lies a customer satisfaction valley. Above nine employees, satisfaction drops like a rock on Jupiter (gravity is stronger there) from 91 percent to just 84 percent. It doesn’t recover until companies top 500 employees, meaning that large organizations actually provide better service than their medium-sized counterparts. This is true across industries and geographies too. We’ve found that mature processes and organizational structures in larger companies drive efficiency at scale, improving customer service.

Unexpected Industries Lead Our Rankings (page 7)

Also surprising is that real estate and IT services and consulting companies rank highest in customer satisfaction. Real estate businesses, which include property management, commercial and personal brokers, as well as investment companies, seem to leave their tenants and customers satisfied–contrary to what most renters may think about property management companies. Further, IT consulting and services companies–on-site software and networking specialists–experience high satisfaction rates possibly due to their problem-solving nature (i.e. they make complicated things work).

IT Exacts Revenge (page 12)

After years of torment, it seems that IT departments have finally been vindicated. Internal help desks trump B2B and B2C help desks for the highest satisfaction rating–94 percent! Clearly, IT help desks have stepped up their game thanks to ITSM practices that focus on treating end users as customers. Either that or employees fear their gatekeeping coworkers. As optimists, we choose the former.

Our eBook
Are you as surprised by these realizations as we are? Download our ebook to explore rankings and more interesting comparisons across more than 15,000 help desks.