BBC’s Watchdog survey shows UK customer service still poor

Yesterday’s BBC’s Watchdog programme published the results of a survey they have conducted on UK customer service.

Out of 7,120 respondents, 5,169 (over 72%) said that customer service was getting worse and only 437 (6%) felt it was getting better. The remainder felt that it was about the same. The biggest issue appeared to be the difficulty in making contact by telephone and the Telephone and Utility sectors seemed to cause the most dissatisfaction.

This follows the findings of our last Customer Care Alliance survey when 78% of the 10,000 plus UK consumers who took part experienced at least one problem with the products and services they consumed. Of these 70% were very or extremely upset by the experience and 83% contacted the organisation at fault (which suggests most of us complain if the problem is serious enough). But a third of those who complained felt they got nothing in response to their contact and few were entirely happy with the way their complaint was handled.

As with Watchdog’s study, our respondents were none too happy with Utility and Telephone companies although Supermarkets and Consumer Electronics were two of the better performing sectors and Banking appeared to be improving.

The telephone was the most frequent method of contact (used by 48% of our respondents) but it took an average of six minutes to get through. And Telephone companies themselves were the worst performing with77% of callers having to wait more than three minutes to reach an agent and 28% stating they had to wait more than 20 minutes.

BT was the most quoted organisation responsible for problems. This may be expected considering its size, but its performance in dealing with its customers’ problems was very lack lustre with only 6% completely satisfied with the action taken to resolve their problem. I believe this may be partly due to BT’s decision to offshore a proportion of calls to reduce costs. Something it must now be realising was a misguided and short sighted strategy.

Despite the recession making it more important to hang on to our existing customers, I think the Watchdog survey has correctly identified that many, mainly large organisations still treat their existing customers with contempt.

If companies want to keep their customers, develop cross-selling opportunities and benefit from Word-of-Mouth recommendations then it is time they invested a bit more into their customer care strategies. And I don’t believe this is very difficult to achieve. It is just a question of balancing the sales and marketing budget a little more in favour of retaining existing rather than acquiring new customers. The little investment required to ensure that existing customers can easily contact and receive attention if they have a problem will easily pay for itself in terms of retained loyalty, increased sales and willingness to recommend.