Did your well-dressed taxi driver greet you with a smile as you hopped into his cab this morning? Did the restaurant manager sprinted from behind his counter to usher you to your reserved table? Wasn’t it great to find the store assistant at an arm’s length when you needed her while shopping and the fact that she wasn’t too pushy when you wanted to take your time?

If none of this happened to you recently, or if nobody took extra care of you in the UAE, you may be an exception.

For, according to a new survey, the UAE ranks a lucky 13th out of 32 major countries around the world when it comes to customer satisfaction. The UAE marginally improved its standing in terms of customer satisfaction, with 85 per cent overall customer satisfaction in the second quarter compared to 84 per cent in Q1 2014.

According to the quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report for second quarter of 2014, New Zealand returned to the No 1 spot with 93 per cent customer satisfaction, beating Norway and Canada, which are tied at No 2 with 92 per cent customer satisfaction.

India, on the other hand, brings up the bottom of the table, ranking No 32 out of as many countries and scoring just 58 per cent in customer satisfaction, a drop of 1 percentage point over the previous quarter.

Customers from India provide the lowest customer satisfaction ratings, and India consistently receives the lowest customer satisfaction rating, states the report. But are Indian companies really giving the worst service in the world, or are Indian customers the most demanding?

The report acknowledges that it is difficult to say. “As data from this study indicates, cultural differences in customers can impact a customer’s expectations of customer service, as well as a customer’s willingness to provide a bad rating for service,” it maintains.

For the second quarter of 2014, the average worldwide customer satisfaction rating reached 83 per cent – a jump of 2 percentage points from the prior quarter — its highest level since the first quarter of 2012.

“A global customer satisfaction of 83 per cent is a good place to start,” says Martin Lingel, Marketing Program Manager at Zendesk Inc., a leading cloud-based customer service platform.

The 2-point rebound in overall customer satisfaction comes as industries with historically poor ratings, including social media and retail, saw recent gains, the report states.

The UAE’s above-average score of 85 per cent in customer satisfaction implies that it beats the global average by 2 percentage points, and is at the same level as the more established markets of the US and the UK.

According to the latest Zendesk analysis, customer satisfaction declines if customer service agents more frequently use apologetic or polite vocabulary in a conversation, while customers benefit by being polite themselves.

“Our research shows that word choice and word frequency have a direct correlation with customer satisfaction,” said Sam Boonin, vice-president of products at Zendesk and research lead on the Zendesk Benchmark report.

“We’ve found there are triggers around the word ‘sorry’, and when used more than twice there is a problem brewing. This can be a helpful indicator for companies to know when to escalate a ticket, avoiding an unhappy customer.”

The report evaluated the effect of ‘sorry,’ ‘please,’ and ‘thank you’ in public comments by agents on customer satisfaction. In all three cases, customer satisfaction decreases with increased use of these words.

With increasing usage of “sorry,” satisfaction drops at a much faster rate versus using the expressions “thank you” or “please.” The increased usage may indicate interactions with those words require multiple back and forth steps, as well as longer resolution times.

Other key findings

Email Address: Users of Yahoo! email provide the lowest customer satisfaction scores at 75.4 per cent, significantly lower than .Mac users at 84.6 per cent. Users of Gmail (78.1 per cent), Hotmail (77 per cent) and AOL (76 per cent) all provide more customer satisfaction scores than Yahoo! Users.

“Armed with this information, companies could decide to prioritise and even escalate tickets from users depending on their email domain,” the report states.

Valediction: The closing of a letter or email, or valediction, presents customer service agents with an opportunity to provide some personalisation to a customer communication. However, not all valedictions will have the same effect. When looking at the sign-off in the last public comment made by an agent to customer, it appears that specific word choices can impact customer satisfaction.

The use of valediction – specifically, ‘yours sincerely,’ ‘best regards,’ and ‘cheers’ – are all better options than other choices like ‘best wishes,’ or nothing at all.

Word Count: Word count is a clear indicator of satisfaction when a web form is the method of communication: the more words in the initial ticket, the less satisfied the customer tends to be. This might not be surprising: how often does anyone write a 200-word support request via a web form? The data indicates an inverse correlation between word count and customer satisfaction.

When submitted via a web form, it is probably not a love letter to the company.

More likely, it’s an unhappy customer on a rant. The same correlation does not exist with email, where the length of the communication is not a predictor of that customer’s satisfaction. The difference between the two grows even starker at the 200-word count, which can sometimes result in higher satisfaction.