Transport in the UK needs to move into a higher gear if it is to deliver better service to users, according to a major survey.
It remains rooted fifth from bottom of 12 private and public sectors in the latest national measure of customer satisfaction by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS).
Research for the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) shows it is moving in the right direction with satisfied customers giving an index rating of 70 out of 100 compared with 67 in the last index in January.
The online poll asked 12,000 people to rate how well companies and organisations performed in key areas such as complaint handling, professionalism, quality and competence and friendliness of staff.
It places transport well behind leaders the services sector, which scored an impressive 79 for satisfied customers. Only local government, utilities, telecommunications and government agencies and departments do worse.
But the results still show the sector had made a welcome improvement on its rating in the previous index, says ICS.
More encouragement can also be taken from the fact that it has moved into the top half of the sector “league table” when it comes to handling complaints.
There have also been advances on staff helpfulness, friendliness and competence.
ICS executive director Robert Crawford says: “The sector is moving in the right direction but it still has some way to travel before it reaches a satisfaction level of 80, which is our benchmark for world-class service.
“It is clear public transport users think that compared with most of the other sectors there is still plenty of scope for improvement.”
But he says the latest index – the most comprehensive measure of customer satisfaction in the UK- shows some “very impressive” ratings for individual organisations within the sector.
P&O heads the sector with an index rating of 84, moving up from second place in the previous index to take over from Virgin Air, which is now second on 81.
Next come Brittany Ferries and Stena, both just hitting the world-class benchmark.
But the sector’s overall average has been brought down by the low sixties scores of the worst performers.
ENDS 01 July 2008
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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.