When it comes to customer experience, there are big gaps between what small businesses say they’re doing and the quality of service they’re actually providing. The stakes are high for small businesses: 85% of customer service managers at SMBs predict the volume of requests their team handles will grow in 2019, according to our research. And customers are more demanding than ever, as they have learned to compare all service interactions to the standard set by giants like Amazon and Uber.

About this report we looked at the differences between what customer service teams say they’re doing and the customer experiences they’re actually providing by analyzing Zendesk Benchmark data from: 6,891 small businesses using Zendesk across 104 countries and by surveying 600 customer service leaders we found that, for the most part, small businesses are struggling to keep up, with big gaps between perception and reality when it comes to customer service. In fact, most SMB customer service teams aren’t set up to meet their objectives.