Hairdressers have lost their top spot as the nation’s favourite small business, according to a major survey.
They have dropped to third in the services sector in the latest national measure of customer satisfaction by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS).
New sector leaders in results announced in the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) are shoe repairers/key cutters with a rating of 86 out of 100.
But hairdressers still managed to attract the same “highly impressive” 84 they registered when the previous index was published in January – and they are so close to second-placed print/copy shops that they are given the same score.
As a sector services came first of 12 private and public sectors in an online poll of 12,000 people - the most wide-reaching measure of customer satisfaction in the UK.
That means that as one of the leading performers in the top sector hairdressers outstrip many UK providers in giving customers what they want and responding to their needs, says the ICS.
“Like many other small businesses hairdressers do well because they give personal attention and are easily accessible if things go wrong,” says ICS executive director Robert Crawford.
“There is no reason why their highly impressive showing cannot be replicated by many of the big, national-name companies and organisations covered in the index.
“Staying close to customers and giving them what they want is an excellent example to follow.”
Local estate agents remain bottom of services providers, behind local builders and plumbers.
ENDS 01 July 2008
For further press information, please contact:
Kay Williamson,
Gravitas Public Relations, 7 Imperial Square, Cheltenham, GLOS GL50 1QB
Tel: 01242 211000
E: Kay@gravitaspr.co.uk
Notes to editors:
ICS is the professional body for customer service whose primary purpose is to lead and raise customer service performance and professionalism.
The ICS completed a major piece of research into what matters most to customers. There are 20 individual factors that can be grouped into five attributes: professionalism, problem solving, timeliness, quality/ efficiency and being easy to do business with.
The full research, including how these service priorities relate to each other and the extent they vary by sector and geography, are detailed in the report customer priorities: what customers really want which is available to editors free of charge from ICS by emailing caroline@gravitaspr.co.uk
This research forms the basis of the UKCSI questionnaire which is a self-completion, web-based survey repeated every six months. Results are determined on a geographically and demographically representative sample of UK adults and data is collected for all organisations with a high market share in each segment of the private sector and the main players in the public sector. This latest UKCSI is based on a sample of 12,000 adults surveyed during May and June 2008.
The UKCSI is produced from the scores received back from the survey asking customers to rate, on a scale of 1-10, their experience of customer service. The questionnaire is based on the 20 factors determining the quality of customer service, and measured across 12 business sectors.
Each of these factors is weighted according to how important customers said they were in the ICS research Customer priorities: what customers really want and the weighted satisfaction scores are used to produce the Index. The weightings can vary from sector to sector – some factors are more important in some sectors than in others - and these are taken into account in the calculation of the UKCSI. This makes the scores exceptionally robust as they are not simply a percentage of respondents who answered a question in the positive or negative – they are derived from a weighted index of multiple questions.
The UKCSI has been welcomed by BSI British Standards. It says: “We believe it is an important step in improving customer satisfaction in the UK as well as a useful tool for consumers and business. Customer satisfaction is a key area of standardisation for BSI and our own work in this area potentially assists organisations to improve their position in the index.”
More information is available at ukcsi.com which details the full methodology of the UKCSI and gives additional information on the results within each of the 12 sectors.