A new study which surveyed 22 appliance brands available in the Australian market has found that 77% of brands surveyed failed to provide a customer experience that would meet or exceed client expectation.
The My CX Customer Experience Study involved anonymous telephone research, similar to mystery shopping, to call centres of 22 well-known appliance brands, including Asko, Bosch, Breville, Dyson, Electrolux, Fisher & Paykel, Fujitsu General, Hisense, KitchenAid, LG, Miele, Panasonic, Samsung, Smeg and Whirlpool.
Four products per brand were chosen with two or three calls per product made to the various call centres using different customer scenarios, with 10 calls made per brand or 220 in total.
The survey found that the average wait time for a call to be answered was 4.7 minutes. Across the 22 brands, only 10% of calls were answered within 20 seconds, well below the industry benchmark of 80%, and 11 of the brands did not have one call answered within this timeframe.
Only one brand exceeded the industry benchmark of having a minimum of 75% of calls resolved on first contact. The majority of the rest fell below 60%.
My CX general manager, Mandy Admiraal said it was quite surprising to see out of the 22 appliance brands and 80 products surveyed that none of the brands achieved the Grade of Service (GOS) industry benchmark of having 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds – only 10% of calls achieved this benchmark.
“Further, only 32% of customer issues were sufficiently resolved during the calls, well below the First Call Resolution (FCR) industry benchmark of 75%.
“Our Customer Experience Index combines the GOS and FCR metrics to give a score out of 10. You would expect most brands to at least score a pass mark of five out of 10, but only five out of our 22 appliance brands passed.
“Customer expectations are very high, and I think our study shows that some companies still have a lot of work to do to meet those expectations. It’s imperative that brands pay greater attention to some of the basics of customer experience.”
