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CUSTOMER SERVICE
BENCHMARK REPORT
Retail and Consumer Goods
JULY 2020

1
Table of Contents
Executive Summary 3

Key Findings 4

Methodology 5

Results 6

Email Support Availability 6

Response Rates 8

Response Times 10

Industry Scorecard 14

Fortune 500 v Non-Fortune 500 Company Analysis 15

Personalization Rate 16

CSAT Survey Frequency 17

Email Address “Type” Analysis 18

Surprise and Delight and Customer Obsession 19

Agent Desk Platform Analysis 22

Conclusion 23

2
Executive Summary
The Customer Service Benchmark Report uncovers how the world’s top
consumer goods and retail companies measure up. We’ve analyzed
companies’ responsiveness, availability of email support, and attentiveness
to special requests.

Customer service is more important today than ever. A company’s ability to resolve issues quickly, conveniently,
and effortlessly has become as essential as product, quality, and price.

As live chat and voice assistants (e.g. Amazon’s Alexa) emerged as ways to resolve issues via 1:1 interactions,
we’ve seen companies de-prioritize email over the past few years. While companies funneled more and more
resources into alternative channels, the change in consumer preferences have not been as swift. Email remains
the preferred digital channel for support. According to Forrester Research, “54% of customers used email for
customer service last year, making it the most used digital channel for customer service.1”

But the problem remains: it is challenging to create a great customer support experience with email. We found
that 70% of companies never respond to an email. More so, 31% of customers² expect responses in one hour or
less, but the average email response time is nearly 36 hours.

Personalization is a glimmer of hope in the current state of email customer support for consumer goods and
retail companies. In addition to availability and response time, personalization is a cornerstone of great customer
service. We found that companies that prioritize email as a support channel are personalizing responses nearly
85% of the time.

Personalization is quickly emerging as a glimmer of hope in the current state of email customer support for
consumer goods and retail companies. In addition to availability and response time, personalization is a
cornerstone of great customer service. We found that companies that prioritize email as a support channel are
personalizing responses nearly 85% of the time.

3
Key Findings

1 Only 56% of retailers have an easy-to-access, readily available email

address

2 Emails often go unanswered: 70% of companies that have an email address

never respond

3 Customers are 8x more likely to get a response on a weekday than a

weekend

4 It takes an average of 36 hours to get a response to a customer service

email request; only 1 in 5 retailers respond within 24 hours

5 Nearly 56% of retailers that respond to customer emails are responding

within 12 hours, and 46% respond within 6 hours

6 On average, Toy & Entertainment companies are the quickest to respond,

within 12.5 hours on average

7 Only 14% of retailers measure CSAT by checking-in to see if a customer is

satisfied with the resolution

8 When given the chance to fulfill a special request, 83% of retailers failed to
deliver

9 Zendesk users are 2x faster than other agent desk software to send a
response

10 Salesforce users also outperformed other agent desk software by 121%

4
Methodology
This is a truly unprecedented study that offers transparency into the most popular brands in retail and consumer
goods. We used NASDAQ’s filter to review publicly traded companies by sector. Out of over 6,000 total stocks,
we analyzed companies classified as a Consumer Goods company (787). In addition to the NASDAQ, we pulled in
every company from the New York Stock Exchange classified as a Retail Trade by CNN (323). Some companies,
like Unilever, have multiple types of stocks (e.g., common, Class A, etc.) listed on the exchanges. In those
instances, we reached out to those companies once instead of multiple times. After accounting for duplicates, the
1010 stocks ultimately equated to 973 unique companies for this study.

Contact Collection Process

To keep the collection process simple, we searched for company contact information in two ways:

1 Visited the company’s website and searched the “help,” “customer support,” or “contact us” section of
the website.
2 Searched on Google “{{Company Name}} Customer Service Email.” We only searched if the result
was listed on the first page of Google.

Not every company had an email address that could be found using this method. To our surprise, 44% of all
companies on our list did not have a customer support email address. After we collected email addresses of
companies that provided one, we sent a brief, straightforward email (50 words) containing the keywords refund
query, refund policies & purchase. We captured and analyzed responses in ten unique dimensions.

Email Availability Response Rate Response Time Customer Happiness Personalization

Company Size Industry Analysis Email Address Customer Delight Agent Desk Platform
Analysis Analysis

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 Email is often not even a choice: 44% of companies
1 don’t provide an easy-to-access email address for
customer support

When looking at the Help or Support

pages of a company’s website, or

56%
searching “company name + customer
support”, a phone number is often
readily available, but email addresses
are hard to come by.
In fact, only 56% of companies had an email
address. Web forms, which are often viewed as
a replacement for email, were offered by 64% of
companies, and 37% of companies offered an Amount of retailers and consumer goods companies
email address and a Web form. Surprisingly, 17% of with a readily availble email address

companies did not have either an email address

or a web form.

Support channels offererd by retailer and consumer goods companies

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While some companies are upfront in the fact that they don’t offer support via email, other companies were less
forthcoming. We saw a few companies conceal an email address in privacy policies, terms & conditions or other
pages that a customer is not likely to look at when seeking support. Customers are not likely to find these emails if
they are hidden in places that customers are not likely to look.

Furthermore, we found that customers were redirected to other channels for support nearly 18% of the time.

7
 The Rare Reply: Nearly 3 in 4 companies ignore email
2 tickets
More likely than not, emails went into a black box: 70% of companies that publish an email address
never responded when a customer reached out. That’s right. Nearly 3 out of 4 companies did not
respond to a simple query about a refund policy.

When you consider that the top reason customers switch to a new brand is feeling unappreciated³, it’s
clear that the least that companies can do is respond to a simple question. The frustration of not having a
response is likely to be much higher than not having an email address in the first place.

30%
70% Do retailers respond to
customer emails?
Yes

No

8
 Response rate of email support varied drastically by
industry:
There was a wide range in the email support delivered from different sectors of the retailer and consumer
goods category. We could assume that home furnishings would put more resources into customer support
due to less frequent buying and higher-priced goods. Generating repeat purchases is critical when new
items are not purchased on a regular basis. To the contrary, food and beverage companies rarely have
a direct-to-consumer relationship as products are typically sold through third-party retailers. As such, it’s
not surprising that these companies did not perform as well as other companies that have a direct line to
consumer purchasing.

Here are the most interesting industry findings:

1 55% of Home Furnishings companies respond, which is 2X more frequently than other retail and
consumer goods companies

2 48% of Apparel, 47% of Fitness, Health & Wellness and 43% of Toy & Entertainment companies
respond to customer emails

3 38% of Food and Beverage Companies and only 18% of Consumer Electronics & Tech companies
respond to customer service email requests

55.0%

46.7% 47.9%
43.2%
42.9%
40.0%
AV E R AG E
37.6%
30.0%

17.9%
Email Response Rates
for Key Industries
Consumer Food & Personal Care & Toy & Automotive Fitness, Health Apparel Home
Electronics & Tech Beverage Cosmetics Entertainment & Wellness Furnishings

9
 Hope that wasn’t urgent: Email response delays are
3 pervasive
Time is of the essence when it comes to
providing customer service. In fact, 66% of
US online adults said that valuing their time is

36x
the most important thing a company can do
to provide them with a good online customer
experience1. This need for speed, though, is not
being met.

Of the 540 companies with email addresses,

only 20% responded within 24 hours. The
average response time is 36 hours. (The The average response time is 36X
median response time is 8.1 hours.) This is 36X
slower than customer expectations
slower than customer expectations, as 31%
of customers expect responses in one hour
or less². (Nearly 10% of the companies that
responded took more than 5 days to respond,
which skewed the average.)

Companies with the fastest response time 1

5 minutes 3 minutes 6 minutes

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Of the companies that respond to customer emails, 56% respond within 12 hours and 46% respond within 6 hours. On
the other end of the spectrum, nearly 1 in 5 companies are not responding within 48 hours.

This shows that companies that are staffing up their support teams to manage email tickets are on the right track, but
there needs to be a focus on decreasing resolution time significantly.

70.0%

20.4%
9.6% Response Time
No Response 0-24 hrs >24 hrs

16.7%
Response Time Distribution
46.3%
0-6 hours 15.4%
6-12 hours
12-24 hours 12.3% 9.3%
24-48 hours
48 hours +

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 Trigger Happy: The use of the auto-reply

It’s important to note that these responses do not include autoresponders, the generic emails triggered within
seconds to thank a customer, acknowledge a ticket and (typically) provide links to common FAQ help articles.

We found that 80% of companies don’t have autoresponders in place. Although autoresponders provide
little value in terms of resolving an issue (that is, unless it is providing links to relevant articles), it at least lets the
customer know their email has been received and they will (eventually) be getting a response.

Are companies using 80%

autoresponders to acknowledge 20%
customer inquiries?
Autoresponder

No Autoresponder

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 Out of office: Weekend responses are rare

More than half of customers expect responses within an

hour, even on weekends⁵. In fact, 57% expect the same
response time at night and on weekends as during
normal business hours⁶.

Our research found that weekend customer support is

very hard to come by. Customers are 8X more likely
to get a response to an email on a weekday than a
weekend.

Not surprisingly, response rates were highest on the day

the email was sent (Wednesday) and fell sharply through
the end of week and the weekend. A significant uptick Best-Performing Companies 1

started happening on Monday. over the weekend

16.7%
Daily Analysis of Email
Response Rates

3.7%
2.8% 3.0%

1.1% 1.5%
0.7% 0.4%
0.2%

Wednesday Thursday Thursday Friday Friday Night Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday (after
Night Morning Night Morning 132 hours)

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4 Customer Service Response Times by Industry
When it comes to resolution time, there is disparity within different segments of the consumer goods and
retail category.

Automotive companies were the slowest to respond, on average, at over 60 hours. This is followed
closely by Personal Care & Cosmetics companies at 54 hours.

The winners in the race against time are Toy & Entertainment companies, getting back in an average of
approximately 12.5 hours.

60.3

50.9 53.7
44.1
AV E R AG E
40.6
36

1 26.6
20.4
12.5 37%

Toy & Consumer Apparel Fitness, Food & Home Personal Care Automotive
Entertainment Electronics & Health & Beverage Furnishings and Cosmetics
Tech Wellness

Average Response Time (hrs)

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 What’s your ranking: There’s a large disparity between
5 support of Fortune 500 companies vs. Non-Fortune
500 Companies
The companies listed on Fortune’s annual 500 ranking list generate the highest revenue in the U.S. in
a given fiscal year. It would be easy to assume that the companies with deeper pockets would push
resources to customer service teams who could in turn provide faster and more convenient support.
Especially in a time when customer service is so closely tied to revenue and loyalty. It was surprising,
though, that non-Fortune 500 companies outperformed Fortune 500 in terms of response time.

In fact, Fortune 500 companies respond 1.4x slower than Non-Fortune 500 companies. The average
response time for Fortune 500 companies was nearly 47 hours, while non-Fortune 500 companies
responded, on average, in 34 hours.

Reponse Time of
Companies

Fortune 500 46.5

Non-Fortune 500

33.7

Avg. Hours to Respond

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 Companies that provide email support prioritize
6 personalization
Personalization is key in customer service. Studies have shown that 80% of customers are more likely to
purchase a product or service from a brand who provides personalized experiences⁷.

For email support on a generic FAQ-type request, we’ve defined personalization as addressing a person
by their first name or having an agent use their own name when signing off. This is the bare minimum in
terms of what defines “personalization” in a customer service interaction as we were not asking account-
specific questions. Customer name and agent name are typically auto filled by most agent desk systems,
and so we assumed the personalization rate by the definition here would be near 100%. We found, though,
that when a customer sends an email to a company, only 26% will receive a response that is personalized.

What’s promising, though, is that the companies prioritizing email as a support channel are using some sort
of personalization 85% of the time. Nearly 72% of companies address a person by their first name. Again,
nearly 72% signed off an email using the agent’s first name.

Do companies use the

28.4% customer’s first name in their
71.6% response?
Yes

No

1.2%

Do agents sign-off using a

name? 26.4%
72.2%
Human
Corporate
None

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 Did we do our job? By and large, companies are not
7 checking in on customer happiness
CSAT measures how well a company is delivering against customer expectations. It enables companies
to adjust processes if customers are not happy. Because it’s the most full-proof way of hearing exactly
from the customer whether or not you provide a good experience and answered their question, we were
surprised that only 14% sent a satisfaction survey out.

That means, nearly 86% of companies are essentially operating in the dark. These companies have no
idea if they’ve provided the sought-after information. In this specific case, we asked for the refund policy
as we were contemplating a purchase. In our study, nearly 90% of companies potentially missed out on an
immediate sale.

14.2%

CSAT Survey Sent?

85.8%
Yes

No

Wayfair was one of very few companies that provided a satisfaction score rating in their emails and follow ups.

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 Email Address “type” indicates the quality of service a
8 person will receive

The email addresses used by retail and consumer

Email Address Example
Example Address
goods companies varied greatly. Some companies Type Company

have “support-specific” emails like support@company. Customer Service / Macy’s [email protected]

com, [email protected]. Other companies used Support

generic email handles like [email protected] or Contact / Info Unilever [email protected]

[email protected]. We even found a few examples
of companies providing a gmail address. Others Chewy [email protected]

We were curious if the email address had any

correlation to the support a person receives. We were

3x
expecting a higher response rate and faster resolution
time from companies that used emails handled by a
support team.

We found that nearly half of companies that used a

customer support-specific email address responded
to emails, as compared to just over 1 in 5 companies Customers are 3X more likely
with generic email addresses. This seems to signal to receive a personalized
that these more generic email addresses are sent to response from customer support
unrelated teams, and these tickets often get lost. designated e-mails.

46.0% 38.6%

AV E R AG E
AV E R AG E
25.6%
30.0%

20.2%
22.3%
15.3% 12.4%

Customer Contact, Info Others

Customer Contact, Info Others Service / & Questions
Service / & Questions Support
Support

Email Response Rate by Personalization Rate by

Email ID Type Email ID Type

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 Customer obsession is out there. One in five
9 companies go above and beyond to suprise and
delight
Many consumer goods and retail companies compete with Amazon, which prides itself on customer
obsession and putting the customer at the center of everything they do.

Research has shown that 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single
positive experience⁸. We wanted to see if companies would go out of their way to truly surprise and delight
customers.

To measure this, we sent a second email at the same time and day of the week as the previous email
with the straightforward customer query on the return policy. The only change is a special ask: to send a
birthday message to a five-year-old whose birthday party was cancelled. The little girl was disappointed,
especially since her favorite character Spongebob Squarepants was scheduled to attend.

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 To our delight, 1 in 5 of all companies we sent
email responded with a personalized birthday
wish. GNC responded with a long message and
images for the birthday girl. TruDog also had a
thoughtful reply, wishing her a happy birthday
from all of SpongeBob’s undersea friends.
Henkel is another example of a company that
sent a personalized birthday wish.

59%

Companies That Went Above and Beyond in GNC went above and beyond to accommodate a special
Their Response customer service request.

Example Companies That Went Above and Beyond 1

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Happy and empowered agents are 20% faster

The companies that stepped up and went above and beyond also performed better across key metrics.
On average, these companies responded 1.25X faster than the other companies that responded to the
initial question about refund policy but dismissed the special request. This seems to indicate that these
companies prioritize customer satisfaction and empower their agents to have empathy. When considering
that these unique and special moments are the types of experiences that can drive unwavering loyalty and
advocacy, the impact of these micro-moments signal repeat business and revenue.

Additionally, customer service agents have one of the highest turnover rates of any industry. This is
because agents report feeling overwhelmed with technologies and accessing multiple systems, and
frustrated with dealing with angry customers. Research has shown that helping others is one way of finding
happiness. While our study did not poll agents, we could assume that the agents fulfilling this simple wish
felt good about themselves, and fulfilled with their work.

Are happier agents faster

at responding?
17.6

Special Request Accomodated

21.9
Special Request Denied

Avg. Hours to Respond

21
 Agent Desk Analysis: Do certain agent desk users
10 perform better than others?

Companies invest in technology to power their customer service

operations. A big investment is the agent desk software and the
workstation for human agents. We wanted to see if there was a correlation
between performance and the agent desk platform that was used. The
two most frequently used agent desk platforms used by consumer goods
and retail companies in our research are Salesforce and Zendesk.

Zendesk users are 2X faster than those on other agent desk software
to send a response. Salesforce users also outperformed those on other
agent desk software by 121%.

In addition to better response times, Zendesk users are using tools to

ensure they are providing good customer experiences. The companies
using Zendesk are 2X more likely to send a CSAT survey to gauge
customer satisfaction with an interaction.

Agent desk response times

212.8%

Zendesk 120.9%
Salesforce
100.0%
Others
Others taken as a benchmark

% of Companies sending CSAT

61.5%
Survey based on agent desk
30.8% Zendesk

Others

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Conclusion

Meeting customer expectations is no longer optional. Retailers that can consistently exceed
expectations will reap the rewards that come from brand loyalty.

With email remaining the preferred channel of choice for shoppers, retailers need to re-prioritize
the support they deliver to customers’ inbox. For retailers to compete on customer service, and turn it into
a business driver, they need to focus on providing quick, personal and meaningful resolutions on email -
whether a person is trying to make a return, track their package or change their shipping address.
It’s cost-prohibitive for most retailers to hire a human-only team to meet the demands of the modern
customer for quick, personalized service - especially at night and on weekends (when expectations
remain the same for timely responses). It’s clear from this report that even the most successful companies
struggle to meet customer expectations in support, especially if they use an all human workforce.
Retailers that opt for a balanced support approach are adopting AI to automate resolutions to simple,
everyday queries, like the question on a refund policy we asked in our research. This resolves issues
within seconds and enables human agents to focus solely on complex customer needs (and even special
requests).

While many companies adopt AI for live chat or messaging support, email is an ideal channel for many
reasons. First, there is a lot of historical data that can be used to train an AI. Second, people don’t expect
an answer immediately on email like they do on chat or voice. This allows companies to start leveraging
an AI Agent “behind the scenes,” recommending responses to agents and conducting reinforcement
learning based on how the agent responds. The demand for effortless experiences is only rising. The
findings in this report suggest that there is a lot of room for retailer customer support operations to make
a major business impact. Companies that invest in processes to augment the support status quo will be
rewarded in the short and long run.

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Here are 6 key areas retailer customer service teams should
look to benchmark and improve:

Omnichannel Availability Personalization Customer Obsession

Be available on every digital Ensure human and virtual agents Empower your agents to surprise
channel including email, chat and can easily access CRM and other and delight customers - whether
messaging. back-end systems to leverage it’s fulfilling a special request,
historical context and shopping anticipating a problem or
history to personalize providing a special incentive.
every interaction.

Response Time Customer Happiness Technology Stack

Decrease resolution times. Track customer satisfaction Use a professional agent desk
Route complex tickets to by sending CSAT surveys which has the tools and an
human agents and leverage after every interaction. This optimized workspace for your
virtual agents to respond will help to identify areas for agents to provide exceptional
quickly to repetitive, everyday improvement and retraining. support.
tickets.

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 About Netomi
Netomi is an AI platform for customer service that
allows businesses to activate, manage, and train
AI to automatically resolve tickets, enhance agent
Let’s improve your email
productivity and provide a world-class customer customer experience and
experience. It’s a channel-agnostic platform that
multiples a company’s workforce by giving valuable
delight your customers.
time back to support agents, and delights their
customers with faster resolutions. Backed by Index
Ventures and Y Combinator, Netomi has offices in
Get in touch at [email protected]
Silicon Valley, New York and India.

You’re in good company...

References:

1. Forrester Research: 2018 Customer Service Trends: How Operations Become Faster, Cheaper — And Yet, More Human https://www.forrester.com/report/2018+Customer+Service+Trends+How+Operations+Become+Faster+Cheaper+And+Yet+More+Hu-
man/-/E-RES142291
2. Toister: How quickly should you respond to email? https://www.toistersolutions.com/blog/how-quickly-should-you-respond-to-email
3. New Voice Media: The $62 Billion Customer Service Scared Away https://www.newvoicemedia.com/blog/the-62-billion-customer-service-scared-away-infographic
4. Hubspot Research: Live Chat Exposes a Fatal Flaw in Your Go-to-Market https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/live-chat-go-to-market-flaw
5. Edelman Digital: Digital Transformation Journal https://edelmandigital.com/digital-transformation-journey/
6. Convince and Convert: 42 Percent of Consumers Complaining in Social Media Expect 60 Minute Response Time https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research/42-percent-of-consumers-complaining-in-social-media-expect-60-minute-re-
sponse-time/
7. Epsilon: New Epsilon research indicates 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences https://us.epsilon.com/pressroom/new-epsilon-research-indicates-80-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-make-a-
purchase-when-brands-offer-personalized-experiences
8. Experience Matters: Customer Experience Leads to Recommendations (Charts For 20 Industries) https://experiencematters.blog/2017/02/23/customer-experience-leads-to-recommendations-charts-for-20-industries/

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