• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 8, 2013

Improving customer satisfaction means fostering online services that allow consumers to help themselves -- especially in mobile, where demand for such tools continues to rise.

The Zendesk Benchmark study released Thursday reveals that the percentage of consumers accessing self-service content from their mobile device rose by 50% in the past year.

In Q2 2013, 26% of consumers tapped self-service mobile services, compared with 17% during the year-ago quarter, according to the study. The challenge now is the ability for companies to keep up with demand for self-service options as consumers increasingly turn toward mobile devices for answers.

The Zendesk Benchmark reports on the health of customer service and identifies trends in how companies provide support, as well as how consumers receive it. The report tracks overall customer satisfaction, based on the aggregated responses of real customers to the question of whether they were satisfied with a support interaction. The findings are based on more than 16,000 companies across 125 countries.

Some industries experience greater success than others. Social media -- which ranks a score of 9.9 -- followed by software at 7.1, and manufacturing at 6.1, lead in the self-service space. Industries such as marketing and advertising -- which came in at No. 15 with a score of 1.5 -- and travel and financial services, with 1.1, had the least.

While social media excels in self-service, it lags in overall customer satisfaction as an industry. The worst industries for customer satisfaction include entertainment and gaming, which have risen 4 percentage points to 76%, media & telecommunications, which remained the same sequentially at 73%, and social media, up 2 percentage points to 64%.

When it comes to industries, consumers are most satisfied with the online customer satisfaction in education, which maintained status quo at 95%. IT Services, real estate, government, and Web hosting round out the top 5. Marketing and advertising came in at No. 11, rising 6 percentage points to 81%.

Customer satisfaction online in the United States rose 2 percentage points to 82%, but this was not enough to rank in the top 10 countries. While the average customer satisfaction rating worldwide rose 3 percentage points sequentially to 81%, the top 10 countries might surprise most marketers.

New Zealand fell 1 percentage point, but came in at No. 1 with 92%. Canada follows rising 4 percentage points to 91%; Australia rose 4 to 89%; Norway, up 2 to 89%; Denmark, up 1 to 89%; United Kingdom, up 1 to 87%; the Czech Republic, up 4 to 87%; Finland, up 1 to 86%; Russia up 6 to 86%; and Mexico, up 4 to 85%, round out the top 10.