Zendesk analysis finds customer satisfaction in travel is on the rise

Travel has broken into the top 10 sectors for customer satisfaction according to the latest Zendesk Benchmark study.

Travel has broken into the top 10 sectors for customer satisfaction, according to the latest Zendesk Benchmark study.

A provider of a cloud-based customer service platform, Zendesk has produced its quarterly analysis since March 2012.

The Q2 2013 results reveal Travel, Hospitality and Tourism has an 83% satisfaction score putting it ahead of Marketing and Advertising, Professional and Business Support Services and Retail.

Top of the chart was Education, IT Services and Consultancy, and Real Estate.

An analysis by country placed the UK in sixth spot with New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Norway and Denmark making up the top five in rank order.

The benchmark is based on actual support or customer service interactions from more than 16,000 firms of the 30,000 that use Zendesk in 125 countries.

The research has found that customer satisfaction generally is closely correlated to consumer confidence so it has been on the rise as economies recover.

The overall 81% achieved in Q2 2013 remains short of the 81% in the first quarter of 2012 but represents a bounce back from a low of 78% in the final quarter of last year.

Matt Price, vice-president and general manager EMEA at Zendesk, said: “In the UK as well as globally, a majority of industries are seeing a rise in customer satisfaction. Interestingly, this coincides with news this week on the first signs of recovery for the UK economy.”

Zendesk has also created a self service score to reflect the growing trend for customers to find out the answers to queries themselves or from their peers online.

Of the 17 industries it looked at Travel scored lowest with just 1.1 while Social Media topped the table on 9.9.

This is an indication of the level of self-support there is in a particular industry. Retail in general also scored fairly lowly on 1.9, the same as Real Estate and ahead of Marketing and Advertising.

Zendesk defined the self service score as the number of users that attempt to use content made available by the company to solve an issue divided by the number of users that submit a request for an answer.

The average score was 4.1. All the industries that scored well in this measure were “born in the cloud”, said Zendesk.

The study also tracked the clear rise in the use of mobile throughout all industries. It tracked the degree to which customers are using mobile devices to access self-service content.

Mobile in travel was found to account for 22% of customer service requests compared to desktop on 77%.

This was towards the upper end compared to most other sectors with the exception of Social Media and Media and Telecommunications which were at 57% and 84% respectively.

“The mobile consumer expects to find information with just a few swipes of a touch screen,” Price added.

“Companies are moving quickly to offer customer self service that’s just as good on a four-inch screen as it is on a big screen.”