During my time with the Institute of Customer Service, I had a lot of involvement with the UK Customer Satisfaction Index; a twice yearly survey that achieves around 40,000 responses from around 10,000 people. It's an online survey relating to the Customer Experience of
different organisations across 13 different sectors.
You can see from the graph that over the last six years, there has been a gradual rise in Customer Satisfaction, with a peak in January 2013, which was then followed by a gradual decline.
Further analysis of this shows that, despite the decline, the utilities sector showed a higher than all average rise in Customer Satisfaction over the last year. The two most improved organisations accross the whole of the UKCSI are Southern Water and Yorkshire Water, demonstrating the impact that the utilities sector is making in terms of improving their Customer Satisfaction.
So now let's look into why there's been a decline in Customer Satisfaction over the past year. One reason, which I'm sure you will be familiar with as business leaders as well as consumers, is the rising power of the customer and their increasing expectations.
The fundamental issue that brands are now facing is that if they don't live up to the expectations of their customers and someone has a bad experience because of this, that customer can and most probably will, just stop doing business with the company. Alternatively, they'll just tell everyone they know about it, including their social media followers.
So now more than ever, brands need to be doing everything they can to understand what their customers want and provide a Customer Experience that reflects their growing expectations.
And how do brands do that? They need to ask their customers what they think of their experience, and take on board any recommendations they offer. That way, brands can actively show their customers that they're listening and value what their customers have to say.
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