Accenture 2009 Global Consumer Satisfaction Survey

The Accenture 2009 Customer Satisfaction Survey is of particular interest given that changing consumer attitudes and behavior will play a key role in setting the pace of economic recovery and generating new opportunities for organic growth. Accenture highlights key findings and offers recommendations.

As the global economy emerges from deep recession, the changing values and behavior of consumers in both mature and emerging markets will define the pace of recovery and generate opportunities for organic growth.

For the past five years, Accenture has surveyed consumers around the world annually about their customer service expectations and experiences. In these challenging and still uncertain times, enterprises seeking growth will need to understand how these issues are playing out in their own markets and customer segments, and define their growth strategies and performance targets accordingly.

Without these insights, enterprises will find it extremely difficult to devise and execute strategies for capturing growth opportunities now and positioning themselves for high performance when the economy improves.

The extent to which consumers have changed in recent years—in terms of their values, behaviors and even their demographics—along with the speed of change have made it difficult for companies to keep pace with their own customer bases, let alone connect with new customers.

To assess the extent and impact of these changes in the customer service channel, Accenture annually surveys consumers in a mix of mature and emerging economies. In 2009, we surveyed 5,050 consumers in 12 countries.

Repeating the trend of previous years, our 2009 survey found that consumers overall continue growing more demanding when it comes to customer service, and that companies overall appear to be falling short. As a result, our 2009 findings include the highest level of switching due to poor customer experiences ever reported in this annual program.

Moreover, across industries, despite the high priority many organizations assigned to customer retention and loyalty during the recessions, most consumers in our survey saw little change in the effort providers made to keep their business.

Specific findings include:

• Globally, 57 percent of respondents reported that their expectations are now higher or much higher than five years ago.
  
  

• In contrast, 75 percent of consumers surveyed in emerging markets (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) reported that their expectations are now higher or much higher than five years ago.
  
  

• Only 45 percent of respondents said that their customer expectations were frequently or always met—a significant drop from 53 percent in 2007.
  
  

• Globally 69 percent of consumers switched one or more companies due to poor customer service over the past year, up from 67 percent in 2008.
  
  

• In emerging markets, the percentage of consumers switching was even higher: 87 percent of consumers, 18 percent higher than the global average.
  
  

• The vast majority of consumers (89 percent) share negative service experiences with others, and 25 percent use social media to alert others.
  
  

• Using the Internet to broadcast service complaints was most prevalent in emerging markets, where 40 percent of consumers said they use blogs and other online media to tell others about their negative experiences.
  
  

• Despite the challenges, the study confirmed that emerging markets offer growth opportunities for companies wanting to expand into new markets Sixty-three percent of consumers in emerging markets expressed interest in trying products and services produced in other countries.

The following conclusions may be drawn from the 2009 survey:
 

• Consumers are more demanding and many companies are not keeping pace. The widening gap between what consumers expect and what they experience is likely to undermine many corporate growth strategies, particularly in emerging markets.
  
  

• Customer satisfaction scores are unreliable indicators of loyalty. While many companies lost customers due to poor service experiences, respondents in eight of the 12 countries surveyed described customer service as generally good.
  
  

• Unhappy customers do damage even when they stay. While respondents to this year’s survey were less apt simply to exit a relationship immediately when they experience poor servicea very large majority relates its bad experiences to others.
  
  

• The alignment of customer service experiences to customer expectations is critical to growth. Although price is the most important factor when choosing a replacement provider, a reputation for high-quality customer service plays an important role. Consumers in the emerging markets identified customer service as the most important factor when choosing a new provider.
  
  
• Digital transformation is granting more control to consumers and poses new challenges to marketers. While consumers continue to prefer obtaining service from a live agent over the phone, digital channels are more frequently used. In addition, consumers are more influenced by online information obtained from other sources than by the provider’s own marketing.

The survey highlights the critical experiences that customer service experiences play in retaining customers, and attracting new ones. In Accenture’s experience, the successful practices of high-performance businesses include:
 

• Putting customers in charge. Companies can help customers to configure their own experiences; for example by choosing which channels they wish to use, or which customer service representatives.
   
• Letting familiarity breed loyalty. Customers tend to prefer businesses that make them feel welcome. One way to foster this feeling is to enable customers to build personal relationships with specific service personnel over time.
   
• Demonstrating state-of-the-art in “do-it-yourself.” For instance, many air travelers now prefer to check in and print their boarding passes from their home computers or airport kiosks. As consumers’ familiarity with self-service channels increases so will their expectations for speed, convenience and personalization.
   
• Making collaboration a focus of innovation. Many companies will find that fostering more collaboration—with external customers, between employees, across value chain partners—a more and more powerful tool for differentiating service.Picture, for example, a field technician who can transmit a video image of a customer’s broken device to the home office, where product experts diagnose the problem quickly and relay precise repair instructions.
   
• Mastering customer analytics. All these practices depend on maintaining seamless integration across all service channels and robust business intelligence and analytics tools. These capabilities make it possible to understand the customers’ true value to the company, predict customer behavior more accurately and identify innovative ways to engage customers in future interactions.