Looking for some customer support statistics to develop your business strategy for 2022?
Understanding customer expectations and their impacts on your business is a great way to get an idea of how you should improve your customer service.
In this post, we’ve gathered tons of customer support statistics all in one place to quickly summarize the state of customer service as it stands now.
Use this table of content to jump straight into the area that interests you most.
- Customer service expectation statistics
- Customer experience statistics
- Personalization in customer service statistics
- Customer service tools statistics
- Customer satisfaction statistics
- The power of great customer service
- The cost of bad customer service
Customer service expectation statistics
95% of customers say that customer service is important to their choice of and loyalty to a brand. (Source: Microsoft)
90% of consumers regard resolution as their most important customer service issue. (Source: KPMG)
52% of customers want to speak to a live agent when facing a crisis and need a solution to a problem with a product or service. (Source: McKinsey’s & Company)
30.9% of customers report they expect to receive excellent customer service, while 40.7% expect a good service experience. (Source: Gartner)
54% of customers say companies need to transform how they engage with them (Source: Salesforce)
75% of customers expect companies to use new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to create better experiences. (Source: Salesforce’s The State of Connected Customer 2019)
86% of customers are more likely to trust companies with their relevant information if they explain how it provides a better customer service experience. (Source: Salesforce’s State of Connected Customer 2018)
93% of customer service teams agree that today’s customers have higher expectations than ever before. (Source: HubSpot)
More than 66% of marketers say their companies compete mostly based on customer service. (Source: Gartner)
93% of customer service teams prioritize creating a great customer experience and retaining customers than saving/reducing costs. (Source: HubSpot)
Recommended reading: The State Of The Ecommerce Customer Service
Recommended reading: 16 Email Templates for Customer Service
Customer experience statistics
88% of customer-centric businesses say delivering a high-quality, personalized, and seamless customer experience across all channels, business lines, and products are important to their company’s overall business performance. (Source: Harvard Business Review)
80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. (Source: Salesforce)
73% of customers say one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies. (Source: Salesforce)
Only 14% of consumers strongly agree that companies effectively provide a positive customer experience through convergence between new digital, mobile, and social channel interactions and more traditional ones. (Source: Accenture)
Over 72% of customers say their prior experiences with a company are the main factor that influences their expectations. (Source: Gartner)
81.6% of organizations agree customer experience offers a competitive edge. (Source: NTT)
57% of contact center leaders put customer experience into their high priority, and 85% of them say customer experience is the main driver for their investment in the contact center. (Source: Deloitte).
25% of brands will have significant advances in the quality of their customer experience in the year 2021. (Source: Forrester)
Personalization in customer service statistics
80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences. (Source: Epsilon)
52% of customers say companies are generally impersonal. (Source: Salesforce’s State of Connected Customer 2019)
76.8% of organizations have advanced some form of personalization capability to improve customer experience. (Source: NTT)
With personalized customer interactions, firms report improved customer loyalty (33%), increased customer engagement (33%), and faster innovation (23%). (Source: Forrester)
Customer service tools statistics
There are 80 help desk solutions currently available in the market. (Source: Datanyze)
57% of companies have already moved (or are planning to migrate) their customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) capabilities to the cloud in 2021. (Source: Deloitte).
82% of companies use help desk systems and/or knowledge bases/FAQ to enable customer service teams, while only 29% adopt live chat. (Source: HubSpot)
Only 32% of organizations use CRM solutions to manage customer data. (Source: HubSpot)
86% of companies that have used a help desk reported that it made them more productive. (Source: HubSpot)
Nearly 82% of companies on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market use at least 3 communication tools like email, phone, and social media to interact with customers. (Source: Jenny).
Using a service desk can help a company decrease support management staff by 50%. (Source: Sphere)
Customer satisfaction statistics
73% of companies say customer satisfaction is their number one metric to measure customer service performance. (Source: HubSpot)
Ecommerce and digital marketing agencies are keeping strong with Net Promoter Scores (NPS) in the low 60s. (Source: Retently)
90% of customers rate an "immediate" response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. (Source: HubSpot)
73% of people say that waiting too long on hold is the #1 “very annoying” thing about being on the phone with a company. (Source: RingCentral)
Recommended reading: How To Respond To An Angry Customer Email
The power of great customer service
66% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. (Source: Salesforce)
56% of customers say good customer service inspires loyalty. (Source: KPMG)
Companies at the top of their industries in NPS for three or more years—grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers and deliver two to five times shareholder returns over the next 10 years. (Source: Harvard Business Review)
63% of U.S. customers are willing to share their personal information with a company that offers a great customer experience. (Source: PWC)
Site visitors who use web chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those that don’t. (Source: Forrester)
Recommended reading: Best Practice for Ecommerce Customer Service
The cost of bad customer service
64% of consumers switch providers due to poor customer experience. (Source: Accenture)
55% of global customers say that they were either unlikely or very unlikely to give a brand a second chance after a negative experience. (Source: Brandwatch)
All verticals face high churn due to poor customer service, including telecommunications (52%), retail/ecommerce (13%), healthcare-related products or services (12%), insurance (11%), and banking/financial services (11%). (Source: TechSee)
American consumers spend an average of 13 hours per year in the calling queue with an estimated monetary cost of $38 billion. (Source: Harvard Business Review)
Recommended reading: 15 Ecommerce Customer Service Best Practices
Multichannel customer service statistics
The top five engagement channels that consumers expect from brands include email, website, voice call, live person, and SMS text. (Source: CMO Council)
78% of customers prefer different customer engagement channels. (Source: Salesforce)
71% of customers expect companies to communicate with them in real-time. (Source: Salesforce’s The State of Connected Customer 2019)
55% of customers—including 68% of millennials/Gen Zers—prefer digital channels over traditional ones. (Source: Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer 2019 Report)
29% of U.S. customers aged 18 to 39 prefer online chat communication before and after purchase. (Source: RingCentral)
40% of people won’t do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred customer service channels. (Source: Salesforce)
Over 85% of contact center leaders say that social media is the simplest way to support customers. (Source: Deloitte)
37% of companies have successfully replaced calls with cheaper or more convenient channels like social media and messaging apps. (Source: Deloitte)
Recommended reading: Why Omnichannel Customer Service Is a Must in 2022 [and 5 Tips To Build Your Own Support Plan]
Self-service support statistics
68% customers would rather use self-service channels like knowledge bases or customer portals for simple questions or issues. (Source: Salesforce)
88% of U.S. customers state that they expect brands or organizations to have a self-service support portal. (Source: Statista)
When reordering, self-service tools are preferred by 86% of today’s B2B executives over dealing with a salesperson. (Source: McKinsey & Company)
During the Covid lockdown, 22% of U.S. banking consumers have used online self-service tools, and 80% of them have had a positive experience. (Source: BCG)
Only 15% of companies on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market have an FAQ page on their website, and just 6.9% established a live chat. (Source: Jenny).
Recommended reading: 22 live chat statistics you need to know in 2022
Chatbot, AI and automation in customer service
Chatbots can learn up to 92% of visitor questions within just five months, but only less than 3% of companies have a chatbot on their website. (Source: Jenny).
Chatbots can resolve a customer request in 2 seconds around 78% of the time. (Source: Jenny’s Customer Experience Trends Report 2020).
68% of customers say chatbots could answer their questions more quickly than a human agent could/would. (Source: Sinch)
69% of consumers prefer chatbots because they deliver quick answers to simple questions. (Source: CMO Council)
About 75% of companies plan to invest in automation technologies such as AI and process automation. (Source: Deloitte).
By implementing AI-powered customer service tools, companies have improved first-contact resolution by 5% to 7%, reduced handling time by 20% to 30%, and reduced new-hire training time by 25% to 40%. (Source: BCG)
By 2022, 20% of customer service will be handled by AI-powered conversational agents. (Source: Gartner)
Are you ready to improve your customer service in 2021?
Now that you know the latest customer service statistics in 2021, check out our list of customer service trends. It’s time to use them to review your customer support strategy, invest in a help desk solution, and train your service agent to enhance the customer experience.
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