67% of homeowners think UK customer service has stayed the same or worsened in last three years

23rd January 2012 - A survey carried out by YouGov has revealed that 67% 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. 22% believed customer service had improved a little over the past three years, and only 3% believed it had improved a lot.

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%).

In comparison, the picture doesn’t look so bleak for service standards over the recent winter and festive period. 44% of homeowners rated the customer service they received as good, followed by 32% giving it an average rating. In London only 5% rated service over Christmas as very good, which was less than the national average (11%).

“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.”

About Cognito

Founded in 1992, Cognito has approximately 20 years experience of mobile workforce management. It was the first company in the UK to be awarded a licence to run a radio network for data transmission and today it provides leading UK service organisations with strategic and innovative mobile solutions, ensuring they deliver consistently superior service, whilst lowering operational costs.

Cognito offers customers a uniquely intelligent workforce management platform, FieldForce IQ; the first field service management solution to combine Performance Management tools with advanced scheduling and intelligent workflow in one integrated platform. It enables organisations to automatically track and schedule jobs, control service delivery at the level of the individual worker and through its real-time view of operations provide visibility, insight and the ability to take action.  This combination ensures the optimisation of workforce service and productivity and the delivery of benefits across the entire service organisation.

Its customer base comprises ambitious organisations with large and mid-sized mobile workforces - 100,000 customers across the UK are served by a Cognito-powered service engineer every day. It clients include Konica Minolta, Lovell Respond, npower hometeam, Baxi Heating and Addison Lee.

YouGov

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2091 adults, of which 1461 were homeowners. Fieldwork was undertaken between 6th - 9th January 2012. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all UK adults (aged 18+). For more details on the survey please download the report from YouGov.co.uk or email tparnell@clever-touch.com