| Kippreport.com

Are you being served?

July 27, 2011 3:19 by p.deleon

At some point in your life you’ve been outraged at how a company treats you as its customer. But there are also those times when you’ve been genuinely taken at how efficient companies can be at customer service. And residents in the Middle East seem to have stories upon stories of mostly bad customer service experiences.

So Kipp and YouGovSiraj wanted to know what exact do customers value when it comes to communication with a brand and what how bad does it have to get to drive them into the arms of competitors.

Check out the results below in this week’s infographic. One of the more interesting points is that only one percent use social media as a way to connect directly with brands—most (51 percent) still prefer talking to a representative on the phone. Maybe this could also mean that social media identities of brands just aren’t visible enough for people to here to even know that they can contact these companies on social media platforms but for now customer service through social media seems like a space that’s sorely lacking.

As you’d expect “friendly staff” was on top of pretty much everyone’s list in terms of what makes their customer service experience satisfactory. Except, 65 percent of Western expatriates in the UAE have put quick problem solving as the number one factor for making a customer service experience satisfactory.

What Kipp didn’t expect to find however is that although 27 percent of respondents in UAE and Saudi Arabia were unsatisfied with their last customer service experience, an impressive 46 percent where somewhat satisfied. Does this really mean customer service in the GCC is really improving? Or have we our standards of what’s ‘good’ been redefined by numerous disappointing past encounters?

Most interesting for companies to note is that six out of seven people would be at least somewhat likely to switch brands after a bad customer service experience—something brands should beware of.