A new survey suggests UK homeowners do not feel customer service has improved in the last three years. Image courtesy of: sxc.hu
A survey carried out by
YouGov has revealed that 67 percent of UK homeowners believe customer service has either stayed the same or deteriorated over the past three years.
The survey, commissioned by
Cognito, mobile workforce management experts, looked at attitudes of over 1,400 UK homeowners, with regard to service provided by consumer-facing organisations.
Twenty-two percent believed customer service had improved a little over the past three years, and only three percent believed it had improved a lot.
Almost half (49 percent) of those surveyed cited unfriendly and impolite staff as the most common reason for poor customer service, followed quite some way behind by timeliness (19 percent) and the inability to fix a customer’s reported problems (19 percent).
In comparison, the picture doesn’t look so bleak for service standards over the recent winter and festive period. Forty-four percent of homeowners rated the customer service they received as good, followed by 32 percent giving it an average rating. In London only five percent rated service over Christmas as very good, which was less than the national average (11 percent).
“This survey tells us that there is still significant room for improvement, especially when customers are viewing it as a key differentiator and increasingly taking to social media to broadcast instances of poor service. An organisation’s service has a real impact on their brand and market share, so boardrooms should start recognising this as an opportunity and that the first place to start is by focusing on service performance management,” said Jonathan Chevallier, Strategic Development Director at Cognito.
“In these times of economic uncertainty, there will be a polarisation of approach: those that invest to improve service and efficiency and those that slash costs. We expect those that invest to be the overall winners in the long term and await to see whether those slashing costs ultimately undermine their ability to provide the service their customers expect.”