When a customer requests information from a company to decide whether to acquire one of its products, or when he needs a problem with one of its services to be solved urgently, the company needs to provide help quickly and efficiently.

‍Therefore, it is vital that its customer service team be prepared to provide an adequate response, and in the shortest time possible. In order to improve customer satisfaction, it is also essential to constantly monitor the team's work. But, are customers satisfied with the service that companies are providing?

What can be done to improve that satisfaction?

There is still room for improvement in customer satisfaction.

‍The company LiveChat recently published a report on Customer Service containing some interesting information about degrees of satisfaction in 2017. To do this they collected data provided by 21,000 companies in 22 industries, using different support tickets and live chats, along with some of their sales and customer service tools. To be exact, they analysed 334 million chats and 17 million tickets.

The main conclusion of this report was that, in general, customers are satisfied: on average, customer satisfaction was 83.54%. Although this data is positive, there is still room for improvement. Also, unfortunately, it was down off the previous year: in 2016, customer satisfaction was at 86.35%.

The report also indicates that, when it comes to meeting customers' online requests, not all companies are equally effective. Of those analysed, technological companies were those satisfying customers most: the level at software companies was 90.6%; web hosting, 89.6%; and at IT, 86.8%.

Companies' size also impacts the service they provide their customers: small (one to nine employees) and medium-sized (between 10 and 49) companies had the lowest customer satisfaction rate, at 81%, which shows that they still have to improve their service.

Another report produced by the company Superoffice, specialising in CRM products, reached even more pessimistic conclusions. The company sent two questions to 1,000 companies, asking them for their telephone numbers and the location of price information on their website.

‍Surprisingly, 62% of companies did not even respond to the email sent to customer service. In addition, 90% did not let the user know that their email had been sent successfully, through a confirmation message.

As for the average response time amongst the companies that answered, it was 12 hours and 10 minutes. The fastest answer was in one minute, and the slowest took 8 days. Thus, as you have seen, customer service continues to be unfinished business for many companies.

Are you taking the optimal measures to satisfy your customers?

‍As we have said, there is still room for improvement to make customer service more effective and, obviously, the response rate to emails should be 100%.

If you lead a team charged with it, you have to ask yourself if the way you are organising it is ideal, and whether you monitor your team's results and analyse its performance adequately.

‍For example, evaluating the average response time to a customer service email is a great help, as customers are more satisfied if they get a quick response.

Customer service teams shouldn't dither about responding quickly or in the best possible way, as the important thing is for the first response to the customer to arrive in just a few seconds, and for the team to, later, have the necessary tools to solve the customer's problem or answer his question in the shortest time possible.

That is, it is not necessary to fulfil all his requests in one's first email, but rather to interact with the customer as quickly as possible, to start the conversation with him.

‍Knowing the number of customer service emails that arrive, either through support tickets or other channels, can also be very beneficial. By analyzing email volume and response times you will be able to know whether your team is able to satisfy all customers quickly, or whether, on the contrary, it is necessary to hire more staff, or change your strategy to meet demand.

Awareness of the best time to contact customers (according to our data, morning is best) can also make communication with them more successful, especially when acting proactively.

It is also a good idea to establish a criterion to ask your customers themselves about their degree of satisfaction. To be able to monitor all this data, Gmail Meter can be very useful. Thanks to its detailed analytics on the team's inboxes, it is possible to measure their performance and act to improve the customer's experience, to strive for a 100% satisfaction rate.

You can improve customer satisfaction by monitoring the average response time of your team's inboxes.

Try emailmeter.com.