Who’s Winning the Game of Customer Satisfaction?

When customer satisfaction is on the rise, everyone wins. Unfortunately, the Q4 Zendesk Benchmark showed a dip in global satisfaction for the last quarter of 2014. The good news is the dip was very small—just 0.26 percentage points below Q3 for a global customer satisfaction score of 94.71% in Q4.

It’s all part of our quarterly benchmark report, which helps companies and organizations understand how their customer service performance measures up with their peers. The Q4 report was released earlier today, and while there were not a lot of changes among the top spots in the list of countries and industries with the highest customer satisfaction, we did witness some interesting movements in the rankings.

Where in the world is the greatest CSAT?

The global customer satisfaction benchmark number was 94.71% in Q4, down by only 0.26 points from Q3 .

Zooming into specific countries, we see our top 3 performing countries from Q3 still in the lead, but our #1 and #2 from switched spots from Q3 to Q4. The order of the top 3 in Q4 now reads: Belgium, New Zealand, and Ireland (New Zealand was on top for Q3).

While we’re not seeing much action in the top 3, Asian countries proved to be up-and-comers this quarter with the greatest improvement in customer satisfaction. China is in the lead in this category with the most improvement followed by Singapore and Vietnam. And on the other hand, the largest dips in CSAT were seen in Malaysia, Colombia, and Argentina.

In other country news, Canada moved up to #6 this quarter from #9 in Q3 and France jumped to #13 from #24 last quarter with a 2 point improvement in CSAT. Turkey’s performance went up 2.4 points but it still has a long way to go before moving out of the bottom. Unfortunately, not everyone’s moving on up. Italy’s CSAT dropped over 3 points and took a dive in the list to #16 from #5 in Q3.

Another holiday dip for retailers

While marketing and advertising, real estate, and Web hosting saw the most CSAT improvement in the industry list in Q4, they were unable to unseat the top 3: government and non-profit, IT services and consultancy, and healthcare. Specifically, real estate made a modest improvement of 0.6 points and moved up to #7. But the top 6 players for industry remained the same from Q3 to Q4.

In addition, we saw the typical Q4/holiday season dip in CSAT for retail with a 0.9 point drop, leaving it at 89.1% in Q4 satisfaction rating. Also slumping were entertainment and gaming, and travel.