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The writer is founding partner of The Foundation, a consultancy, and co-author of ‘The Customer Copernicus — How To Be Customer-Led’
The experience of being a customer in the UK has left many of us feeling severely bruised. Anecdotally, we all have a sense of the nation’s disenchantment with a range of services, from train franchises to health providers to broadband companies. But when we commissioned a poll to rank the best and worst customer service experiences, it was striking quite how bad things were.
This matters, because bad service and wasted time damages national productivity and depresses our mood. Its knock-on effects breed further negativity: frustration leads to poor behaviour from customers towards company representatives. People spend an average of 35 minutes waiting to get through to energy businesses on the phone, although this can climb to an hour and 25 minutes at peak times, according to a 2023 study by Microsoft.
Customers’ patience with poor digital experiences — slow-loading pages or links that don’t work — is, if anything, even lower. AI promises much, but only if done well. One recent study by Interactions found people increasingly frustrated at repeating themselves to customer service technology that doesn’t understand what they’re saying.
According to our poll, the “vampires” — the organisations sucking away our time and energy — are led by train companies, with one in three people regularly finding them problematic or enraging. They’re followed by public healthcare providers, local public transport, low-cost airlines and energy companies, education providers, water and broadband companies. Among named organisations, those polled expressed most frustration with the NHS, followed by HMRC, city councils and Facebook. British Gas, local GPs and Ryanair also fared badly.
Business leaders acknowledge the problem. Of the 250 executives we interviewed, only 10 per cent feel their sectors are consistently excellent at meeting customers’ needs. This is not just complacency: most managers feel pressure to hit short-term targets, which are only achieved when they sell harder or cut costs. They’re compromising and they know it — but re-engineering an organisation to take a longer-term view that puts customers first requires a revolution.
At the brighter end of the spectrum, the “hero categories” include streaming services, independent cafés and restaurants. Surprisingly, banks were just outside the top 10 with 60 per cent of respondents saying their service was reliably good. This suggests people have embraced the convenience of online banking and are no longer mourning the loss of high street branches. Among individual companies, Amazon and Netflix lead by a distance, with Aldi, Apple and, in between them, the NHS again — which is a source of national pride when it works, but catastrophic when things go wrong.
What can we learn from the businesses that provide good service to improve the bad ones? While these lists might seem eclectic, some trends are clear: higher-performing sectors are likely to be those in which there is plenty of competition; those doing less well are in areas with fewer alternatives, often covering necessities rather than leisure activities. There are some outliers, however — Octopus Energy receives much better reviews than its competitors and the NHS ranks both very well and very badly.
Improving services isn’t just good for customers: there are benefits for the companies too, in increasing demand and reducing the costs of handling failure. But it is deceptively hard to do. The larger the organisation, the more layers of management to bring on board — which gives independent businesses an advantage. Achieving change takes an outward-looking leader who is prepared to take a difficult and expensive risk — one which will ultimately pay off not just for them but for the people they serve.
Read the full article here