YouGov survey reveals there’s still significant room for improvement in UK service

Our January survey commissioned with YouGov has revealed that consumers’ perception of customer service has stayed the same or worsened in the last three years.

We looked at the attitudes towards service provided by consumer-facing organisations of over 2,000 UK homeowners, to help our clients get an understanding of what counts for their customers. Almost half (49%) 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%) and the inability to fix a customer’s reported problems (19%).

This clearly ties in with the imperative for an organisation to engage with its employees and motivate the workforce, which we believe (along with The Aberdeen Group) to be a key priority for this industry in 2012.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom however, with service over the recent festive period reported as positive. Forty-four per cent of homeowners rated the service they received as good, followed by thirty-three per cent giving it an average rating. In London, five per cent rated service over Christmas as very good, which was less than the national average (11%).

The survey should be a wake up call for all of us in that there is still significant room for improvement, especially when customers are increasingly taking to social media to broadcast negative instances. From previous research, we know that an organisation’s service has a real impact on its brand and market share, so boardrooms should sit up and see this as an opportunity.

In these times of economic uncertainty, we believe that there will be a polarisation of approach: those that invest to improve and those that slash costs. It will be interesting to see who the overall winners are in the longer term.

For more details on the survey please download the report from YouGov.co.uk here.