Brands Making Customers Work Too Hard—and it’s Affecting Customer Loyalty, J.D. Power Finds

Inaugural Study Finds Widespread Challenges across Multiple Industries and Customer Touchpoints

In the modern customer service environment, easy and frictionless make for a winning combination, but engaging with customer service can feel like way too much work for many customers. According to the inaugural J.D. Power U.S. Cross-Industry Customer Service Experience Study,^SM released today, the average consumer is spending 18.10 minutes every time they engage with customer service, and approximately 40% of the time when using the phone, they need to provide the same information more than once. This high level of perceived effort is dragging down customer satisfaction and customer loyalty across several industries.

The new study is the first of its kind to evaluate the complete customer service experience across multiple channels within the industries of investment; insurance; travel and hospitality; telecom; utilities; and other industries. Of all industries measured, telecom yields the lowest customer service satisfaction results in both the wireless and internet segments.

“The goal of elevating the customer experience should be a strategic imperative for all brands,” said Denese Waiters, senior director of customer experience intelligence at J.D. Power. “It is not enough to simply deliver good service. For brands to get a boost in customer advocacy and improve customer satisfaction, they need to consistently strive for great-to-perfect service.”

Following are some key findings of the new study:

• Good is not good enough: To build long-term customer advocacy and lifetime value, brands need to provide a “great,” “excellent” or “perfect” service experience. Merely providing “good” service results in a score of -10 (on a scale of -100 to 100) in Net Promoter Score^®,¹ while “just OK” results in a score of -45 and “poor” service results in a score of -80.

• Get it right the first time: First contact resolution continues to pose challenges for several industries. Overall satisfaction scores are more than 200 points higher when customer service queries and problems are addressed on the first contact, regardless of customer touchpoint. Likewise, satisfaction scores are more than 150 points higher when customers are not required to repeat the same information during their interaction with a brand.

• Lots of room to improve: Overall customer satisfaction with the customer service experience across financial investment services; insurance; travel and hospitality; utilities; telecom and other industries is just 605 (on a 1,000-point scale). Average customer service satisfaction scores are highest in the financial investment services industry (716), followed by insurance (610), travel and hospitality (596), utilities (562) and telecom (519).

• Too long to resolve a problem, especially on the phone: The average amount of time it takes to resolve an issue with customer service is 18.10 minutes. The phone is the slowest channel, coming in at 23.64 minutes, followed by in-person (15.62 minutes); website (11.41 minutes); and mobile app (10.75 minutes). Overall satisfaction scores drop precipitously if the customer needs to wait five minutes or more to speak to a representative in person or wait five minutes or more on hold. For website and mobile app-based customer service, customer satisfaction scores start to deteriorate after nine minutes.

Methodology

The J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Cross-Industry Customer Service Experience Study measures overall customer satisfaction with customer service functions in the investment, insurance, travel, telecom, utilities and other industries, across the following channels: in-person; phone; website; app; social media; and text/email/mail. The study is based on 21,872 completed surveys from U.S. residents who engaged with customer service during the past three months. The study was fielded from May through July 2023.

For more information about the J.D. Power U.S. Cross-Industry Customer Service Experience Study, visit https://www.jdpower.com/business/cross-industry/customer-service-experience-study#benefits.

See the online press release at http://www.jdpower.com/pr-id/2023119.

About J.D. Power

J.D. Power is a global leader in consumer insights, advisory services and data and analytics. A pioneer in the use of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic modeling capabilities to understand consumer behavior, J.D. Power has been delivering incisive industry intelligence on customer interactions with brands and products for more than 50 years. The world's leading businesses across major industries rely on J.D. Power to guide their customer-facing strategies.

J.D. Power has offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. To learn more about the company’s business offerings, visit JDPower.com/business. The J.D. Power auto shopping tool can be found at JDPower.com.

About J.D. Power and Advertising/Promotional Rules: www.jdpower.com/business/about-us/press-release-info

¹ Net Promoter,® Net Promoter System,® Net Promoter Score,® NPS,® and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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