CX Trends Report 2022: Looking back at a year’s worth of data
In the midst of rising inflation and swirling economic uncertainty, a strong customer experience is crucial for businesses heading into the new year. But what support agents think makes a great customer experience doesn’t always line up with what customers actually want.
Freshworks research shows that over 93% of customer service managers believe quick response times define a great customer experience. But the same data revealed that fast response times, in fact, didn’t correlate to high customer satisfaction scores.
To see what other insights we could pull from data — and to better understand the customer experience landscape — we compiled this ‘trends’ report from our own Freshdesk Customer Service Benchmark Report. It includes data from Freshworks’ CX dashboard and Freshchat, revealing five unique CX trends in the last calendar year.
The Freshdesk Customer Service Benchmark Report measures things like how long it takes for an agent to respond to a ticket (average first response time) or how satisfied customers are with the quality of service via a customer satisfaction score (CSAT). It also exposes how industries, geographies, and human vs. automated services match up.
CX Trend 1: The Holiday’s Newest Helper: Chatbots
On Black Friday this year, despite fears of a recession, we saw huge sales. An estimated $9.12 billion was spent online, and sales increased by 2.3% from 2021. The National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics reported a record 196.7 million consumers shopped both online and in stores between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday.
Beyond Black Friday, retail sees enormous peaks and valleys over the holidays. In 2021, customer service ticket resolution peaked by 3X in the first three weeks of December and dropped to its lowest volume in the last week.
With such drastic fluctuations in online customer traffic, introducing bots during this critical time of year can help businesses maintain high customer service approval — throughout the busy shopping season and beyond.
CX Trend 2: Agent + Automated Bots Beat Email
When businesses offer a combination of automated and agent-powered chatbots, customers win. Automated chatbots can serve as valuable partners to agents by addressing inquiries that don’t need human interaction, saving time and energy for agents to handle more complex issues. Gartner even predicts that by 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations.
Our data found that businesses that offer chat support with agents and bots save over 37 hours in average resolution time — 93% faster than businesses that only use email support.
At Blue Nile, we use Freshworks products to resolve approximately 90% of our customer queries during the first touch point – something that is particularly critical during the busy holiday season. Freshworks’ automation features provide us with a system that automatically categorizes, prioritizes, and routes tickets to the right support agent or group, saving agents hours of manual effort and giving them time to focus on solving critical customer issues.
– Michael Hopkins, SVP of Sales and Service at Blue Nile
CX Trend 3: The Best Customer Service Is Self-Service
Thanks to the sophistication of AI and other tech, customers expect brands to respond to or resolve their issues in seconds, not minutes. This demand is reshaping customer experience and redefining what a satisfied customer means.
With more customers frequently reaching out to businesses, increasing contact volumes can overwhelm an agent. Every 100 extra monthly tickets per agent can lead to a 1% drop in CSAT scores. Enabling robust self-service resources and AI-bots can help ease this heavy burden.
Helping customers help themselves with “how-to” content also pays off. Businesses that have published up to 250 solution articles in their online presence have an average CSAT of 80.3%, pushing them over the global benchmark for customer satisfaction with a nearly 4% gain over businesses that don’t rely on self-service portals.
CX Trend 4: E-Commerce Wins The Speed Race — But Not Customer Satisfaction
Among the top industry verticals, e-commerce businesses are the quickest to respond to and resolve customer tickets. It takes e-commerce 5.7 hours to first respond to a customer (slightly less than the global benchmark of 6.0 hours) and 23.6 hours to resolve customer issues (more than 15 hours less than the global benchmark). Yet customer satisfaction for e-commerce (76.31% CSAT) is slightly less than the global benchmark (79.4%).
Software & IT is the slowest to resolve customer tickets, with the longest average resolution time (51 hours). Yet its customers are slightly more satisfied (CSAT 80%) than the global benchmark (79.4%).
Education and Government or Nonprofit organizations have high CSAT scores at 86.36%. Education also had the highest median CSAT among the top 15 industry categories, with governments and nonprofits coming in second overall with a CSAT of 85.94%.
Colin Crowley, our CX Advisor at Freshworks, explains some of these industry variations:
It’s not surprising to see this wide range of resolution times and customer satisfaction levels across industries. For instance, IT and Software are likely handling more complex back-office challenges that, by nature, take longer to resolve than a simple, frontline request like tracking an order. Creating a great customer experience relies on understanding what your customers are facing and offering the best solutions based on their needs.
CX Trend 5: Around The World
The U.S. and the U.K. are near the middle of the pack when it comes to ticket resolution, and while the U.K. takes less time to resolve tickets, the U.S. has higher customer satisfaction. We organized the most relevant CX stats by regional personas for easy comparison:
The U.K.
| Average resolution time | 38.6 hours |
| Average first response | 6.3 hours |
| Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) | 82.1% |
The U.S.
| Average resolution time | 39.7 hours |
| Average first response | 6.0 hours |
| Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) | 83.3% |
Global:
| Average resolution time | 39.7 hours |
| Average first response | 6.0 hours |
| Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) | 79.4% |
Elsewhere in Europe, Poland is the quickest to resolve customer problems, yet Finland has the happiest customers.
- Poland has the lowest average resolution time (32.4 hours). The country also has the highest SLA compliance (91.93%).
- Finland has the highest customer satisfaction with a CSAT of 84.74%.
- Singapore had the quickest first response time (6.0 hours), an average resolution of 33.6 hours, and fell below the benchmark with a CSAT of 69.55%.
- Australia had a slower first response time of 7.3 hours, its average resolution was a middle-of-the-pack 38.1 hours, and it had a high CSAT at 81.82%.
To see the full report, click here: Freshdesk Customer Service Benchmark Report 2022
Methodology: Freshworks analyzed data from multiple sources to develop the 2022 Customer Service Benchmark Report. Those sources included data from more than 1.1 billion unique support tickets from January 1, 2021 – December 31, 2021; aggregated and anonymized data from 40,060 customers across 153 countries and 93 industry categories that use Freshdesk; anonymized data from more than 2,800 organizations that use Freshchat; and insights from 300 Freshdesk customers who responded to a Freshworks survey on customer service trends and customer expectations in 2022.
The “CX Trends Report 2022” blog contains data from the Freshdesk Customer Service Benchmark Report, Freshworks’ CX dashboard, and Freshchat data. The Freshchat data focuses on Freshworks’ retail customers, identifying data and trends in two parts – the volume trend of overall tickets handled in the past year and the volume trend of tickets dealt with exclusively by chatbots in the past year. The sample accounts that were used are U.S. or Europe-specific.
