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Time is no longer the main factor in customer satisfaction
Focus on personalised service and self-service
Self-service is becoming increasingly popular, while there is a need for a greater focus on customer care. Nordic countries have the highest customer and employee satisfaction, while Central European countries also score well in customer satisfaction, but employee satisfaction is significantly lower. Western European countries appear to have mature contact channels, tools and working methods, but relatively low customer and employee satisfaction, according to the second, expanded edition of the Deloitte Customer Service Excellence Report 2022.
This year, Deloitte covered 3 regions: Northern (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway), Central (Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovakia) and Western Europe (France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria), with data collected on the basis of a survey of customer service managers.
The study traces perceptions of the factors that influence service excellence and also provides an understanding of the frontend and backend of the customer service function.
Customer service has also been examined from the customer, employee, manager and board perspectives to gain a better understanding of the needs and trends, as well as the challenges facing customer service departments.
– said File Ágnes, Salesforce Practice Lead, Deloitte Digital Hungary.
Self-service on the rise
There is a clear trend that companies have recognised the value of self-service and are clearly making further improvements and investments in this channel. The main investment focus is in mobile apps, chatbots and/or voicebots. 60% of respondents said their company should invest in self-service, 43% would like to invest in chatbots. 39% see opportunities in mobile apps and 25% are interested in investing in voicebots. The survey also shows that usage of self-service has a positive impact on both customer and employee satisfaction levels which are increasingly important.
Time to increase focus on personalization and customer care
In line with other Deloitte trend reports, this survey supports the fact that customers have a clear and growing need to be supported by personalized service. In fact, CSC respondents rated the personalized services as the most important factor that customers care about, which also had the highest positive impact on customer satisfaction.
While some customer services still focus their performance on the most commonly used KPI - time - this can be a barrier to personalisation. Although efficiency is still an important factor for customers, time is no longer the factor that drives customer satisfaction. Customer Effort Score (CES) is an emerging KPI focusing solely upon the customers’ point of view, which could be utilized to measure the level of personalized service in various conversational channels. CES has one of the highest impact upon customer satisfaction, yet, is a metric that is the least commonly used. It is time for customer service leaders to shift the focus and measurements to customer care.
– Ágnes File added.
Independent Customer Service Centers are the most effective
The findings from the study show that effective Customer Service Centers are independent units within the organization. It seems that multi-skilled teams, where tasks are distributed in an automatic way, respond to the customer needs much better than those divided by channel, process or customer type. Those teams are more flexible towards current needs and can better adapt to changing circumstances. However, there is a cost related to this approach that must be considered – satisfaction rate in multi-skilled teams is much lower. Tasks requiring wide knowledge are not easy things to cope with and therefore, companies will need to develop effective knowledge management strategies and care about the employee well-being even more.
Regional differences
In terms of self-service, the Nordic countries are the most advanced, with 75% of respondents saying they use this feature. In Western countries the figure was 70%, and in Central European countries 49% - showing that there is a serious gap in this respect in the region.
The average score in the survey was 3.77 for Customer Satisfaction (CS) and 3.52 for Employee Satisfaction (ES).
Overall, the Nordics hold the highest customer and employee satisfaction (3.91 and 3.93, respectively) through use of multi-skilled teams in independent units. Also, there are more investments in workload reduction using automation.
Central have a wide variety of priorities, with improving customer satisfaction, shortening response time and self-service in focus. It is an advantage for these countries that they have the second highest average Customer Satisfaction (3.82), but, compared to Northern countries, significantly lower Employee Satisfaction (3.39).
Of the three groups surveyed, Western countries had the lowest satisfaction scores for both customer satisfaction (3.47 points) and employee satisfaction (3.22 points). This may be related to the fact that the responding Western companies are larger than those in Northern and Central European countries.
Of the three regions surveyed, Nordic countries were the most likely to say that personalised service was the most important factor for customer satisfaction (34%), followed by problem solving through self-service (32%) and then time taken to solve the problem (16%).
In the Central European countries, time taken to solve the problem was cited as the most important CS factor (33%), followed by personalised service (32%) and then self-service (9%).
In the Western countries, time taken to solve the problem (33%) was the most important CS factor, followed by problem solving with self-service (28%) and personalised service (17%).
In which sector are customers and employees most satisfied?
The leading organisations in terms of both customer and employee satisfaction came from the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT), retail, tourism and transport sectors. These organisations also have higher than average CS and ES scores. The telecom sector is of particular interest as this industry received relatively low Customer Experience (CX) ratings from customers in the 2022 Deloitte CX Drivers report. This indicates that respondents to this survey perceive their customer satisfaction as higher than what customers actually say.
The financial services sector was rated slightly below average for both CS and ES. However, the two main sub-sectors were rated differently, with the banking sector rating higher than the insurance sector, particularly in terms of employee satisfaction.
Traditional industries, such as manufacturing, energy and raw materials, have significantly lower ratings for both CS and ES. These industries are on the threshold of changing their approach to customer experience management. While companies in the energy and raw materials industries tend to look for sustainability and new energy solutions, manufacturing companies traditionally do not engage with their customers on a personal level.
The complete study is available here: Customer Service Excellence Survey 2022 - International Edition | Deloitte Hungary
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