Survey: corporate execs vastly overestimate customers' satisfaction

A (somewhat dubious) survey of 850 business executives for firms of 500 or more employees "with involvement in the decision making process regarding customer experience in their organization" and 4,500 consumers "who have contacted a brand during the last six months with an enquiry or issue to be resolved" found a vast gap between how satisfied the executives believed their customers were and how the customers felt about their interactions.

The study should be taken as guideline more than gospel: it was commissioned by a company that provides chatbot technology (and whose report predicts that the customer satisfaction gap could be bridged with chatbots -- something I am personally dubious about) and the sampling methodology is murky and thinly described.

That said, the gap is vast. 80 percent of execs believe their customers are satisfied with the service they get; while 83% of the customers surveyed gave their satisfaction as "average" or "poor."

Both business and consumer respondents agree that telephone and email are among the most common channels used to conduct business. However, they also tend to produce the slowest time to resolution.

The average time to resolution was 11 hours -- almost three times higher than the wait time cited as being acceptable. Telephone interactions tend to be resolved in 7 hours, and email is 18 hours.

Only one in three (32 percent) of consumers believe they get the best results when interacting with a brand when an AI-powered chatbot is involved in some capacity.

Average time to resolve problems is three times higher than customers want [Eileen Brown/Zdnet]

(via /.)