By Vivienne Russell | 18 December 2012
Customer service at Revenue & Customs has been ‘unacceptable’ and offers the public poor value for money, auditors said today.A National Audit Office inquiry acknowledged that the department had improved customer service levels from a low point identified in 2010 when problems with the new National Insurance and Pay As You Earn system increased the number of queries. Better phone technology and the employment of 2,500 temporary staff had helped R&C deal with the backlog.
But in spite of this, 20 million calls were not answered in 2011/12. Only three quarters (74%) of all calls received were answered, a level of service the auditors called ‘low’.
Customers who did manage to get through had to wait an average of 282 seconds (or almost five minutes) before speaking to an adviser. In the first half of 2011/12, 6.5 million customers waited for more than 10 minutes before they managed to speak to someone. The NAO estimated customers paid a total of £33m in call charges while they waited in a phone queue.
Progress in the current year has been varied, the watchdog said, although in October R&C managed to answer 91% of calls, its best monthly performance since December 2009.
The NAO concluded that the department’s future service targets are ‘ambitious’ given its previous record and plans to reduce contact centre staff numbers. By 2014/15, it will need to redeploy large numbers of back-office processing staff to answer telephones if it is to meet its target of answering 90% of calls.
NAO head Amyas Morse said: ‘The taxpayers and claimants who phone R&C do not have a choice about whether they interact with the department. Despite some welcome improvements, R&C has acknowledged that its performance in providing services to the public has been unacceptable.
‘R&C faces difficult decisions about whether is should aspire to meet the service performance standards of a commercial organisation. It could do only by spending significantly more money or becoming substantially more cost effective.’
Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge agreed with Morse’s assessment that customer service at R&C had been ‘unacceptable’ and she said current call-answering targets were ‘far too soft and way below industry standards’.
Hodge said: ‘R&C needs to be far more ambitious in its efforts to improve the customer service it currently provides. Targets must better match those of other organisations to greatly reduce the time callers are left hanging on the line and it needs to provide alternatives to [costly] 0845 numbers.
‘Customer service at R&C has been too poor for too long. It needs to put in place a formal strategy for how it is going to make long-term service improvements that centre on the needs of customers.’
Responding to the report, an R&C spokeswoman said: ‘By late 2012 we were answering over 90% of calls to our contact centres but we are well aware that in the past we have not delivered the standard of service to which we are committed. We are determined to build on this progress and we have invested £34m so we can deliver on our improvement targets earlier than planned.’
