Online Survey Company in the UK
In the build-up to the Stop doing dumb things... to our customers and our people unConference, we have shared the summary findings of the UK Customer Care Survey that we conducted in 2008. Each year between 2004 and 2008 we pretty much saw the same results - consistently good customer service is hard to find! If you're looking for the PDF summary it can be downloaded here (or click on the … [Read more...]
The hot news today is that British Gas is being fined £2.5 million by Ofgem for its poor complaint handling performance – particularly for their small business customers. The ofgem press release dated 27th July 2011 can be viewed here. As an aside, I wish there was an Ofgem monitoring the Royal Mail who have failed to respond to a Surveylab complaint for over two years! It’s quite a … [Read more...]
My family was booked on Eurostar on that Saturday for a short weekend break to EuroDisney, that day four Eurostar trains broke down in the tunnel. Luckily (compared to many others) we were just getting the kids' breakfast and finishing packing when we first heard of the unfolding travel problems - at least we weren't trapped in traffic, at a terminal somewhere in Kent, or worse. After the initial … [Read more...]
As reported in The Times today, in response to a shareholder's question at BT's AGM, Chief Executive Ian Livingston announced that BT is moving 2,000 call centre jobs back from India to the UK. This apparently resulted in a huge round of applause perhaps reflecting the UK consumers' hatred of the offshore call centre. The move is probably more about the UK economy and minimising redundancies than … [Read more...]
There are plenty of bad customer experience stories online - on homepages and blogs, forums, twitter, and elsewhere. In last year's UK Customer Care study we found that 3% of respondents who had a serious problem with some product or service wanted revenge and make [the company/organisation at fault] pay for the hassle and inconvenience 10% just wanted to express their anger / tell their … [Read more...]
Three cheers for Carphone Warehouse!! Alexandra Fean’s article in last Saturday’s Business section of The Times discussed Carphone Warehouse’s decision to reward staff on service rather than sales. She did not go into a lot of detail but I can report that they are using the Net Promoter©* scoring methodology to measure customer satisfaction and reward staff according to their … [Read more...]
Yesterday's post by Dan (A cautionary tale about ISP Customer Care - the power of negative word of mouth) is not untypical of the frustration felt by literally hundreds and thousands of consumers across the country. We've mentioned before that we conduct the annual UK customer care study for the Customer Care Alliance. This deals specifically with how organisations respond to consumers with … [Read more...]
The ISP and domain registrar 123-Reg upset me enough to turn me from an already dissatisfied customer into an angry customer a couple of weeks ago. The disappointing thing is that they had the opportunity to convert me to "quite satisfied" status by simply giving me an explanation that would go some way to giving reassurance, but they blew it by ignoring what the customer was saying and hiding … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
Twitter is the web's buzzword (killer app?) of 2009. It enables anyone to micro-blog - post comments up to 140 characters in length (called tweets) - and to follow other people to read what they are commenting about. A big differentiator between Twitter and other social networking applications is that you can "tweet" from your mobile phone by sending a plain old text message. This means that you … [Read more...]
Offering expert advice for designing and implementing online survey best practice. We share our experiences working in the fields of customer satisfaction and employee engagement research.
