Zendesk runs help desks for 15,000 customers. The company recently crunched the data from these customers, analyzed it and as a result has set benchmarks for what companies should strive for in their customer service efforts.

The results are reinforcing in what you might think of in terms of what works with customer service. But more interesting is who is doing a great job and who is not.

As part of its report, Zendesk cites global survey developed by Genesys that found customer service costs companies $338 billion per year. About 82% of Americans said they stopped doing business with a company because of a bad customer service experience. The average value of each lost business relationship is $289.

Real estate and IT Services and Consulting have the highest customer satisfaction at 99% and 66% respectively.

But here’s the shocker. Companies that provide social media are at the bottom of the rankings. That makes you wonder about the core values of social media companies. Are they full of it when they talk about the value of relationships and conversation?

Some of the other findings:

• Mid-sized businesses lag behind small business and large enterprise providers. This is in part due to the growing pains that come with scaling a business. It’s not until companies reach 500 employees and have mature processes and structures that they recover their levels of customer service.
• Support sites that service external customers score the lowest of any audience.
• People rate their internal help desks better than help desks that support external customers.
• Croatia has the highest satisfaction score (99%). Turkey scored 43%, giving it the lowest score of all countries.

Overall, Zendesk found that bigger companies that efficiently deliver high-quality support at a large scale have the most satisfied customers.

Scale is defined by the number of tickets a company has. Efficiency is measured by a company’s first response time and quality comes with the percentage of tickets that get resolved.

These definitions set the benchmarks. According to Zendesk and its study of 15,000 customers,  companies should be seeking an 86% customer satisfaction rate and 23.6 hours for first response time. A company should aim to have less than 630 tickets per month.

Social media companies have the highest number of tickets. Inversely, real estate and IT services and consulting have the lowest number of tickets. That explains the poor overall ratings for these two industries.

Services Angle

So what constitutes great customer service?

Immediate response time is critical. The clock starts ticking the moment you receive a ticket.  According to Zendesk, companies with first-response time under ten hours have customer satisfaction of over 90%.

You need to be where your customers are.  That means being on Facebook, Twitter, email, phone or chat.

And you need to let customers serve themselves. Companies with rich Web resource centers and community forums do best with their customers.

The customer service game is changing. It’s now about the Web more than anything else. You need to be where customers are.  And you need to be fast.

I think it’s time for social media companies to listen up.