Customer support becoming increasingly urgent priority for UK biz

UK employees could be wasting almost 223 hours a year, a report from Rackspace has suggested.

In the company’s Rackspace IT Industry Service report, IT teams were found to have suffered the most: 39 percent were estimated to be losing at least six hours each week on fixing IT problems and dealing with suppliers.

It is not hard to make the leap that this waste of time has severe implications for productivity. Good approaches to customer service, then, are becoming increasingly crucial for mid-sized and enterprises businesses, Rackspace said. Just under half of the survey respondents – at 48 percent- said customer service has become more important over the last year. Over a quarter of those surveyed, at 27 percent, said customer service is already a high priority.

A large majority of respondents – 69 percent – had dropped suppliers over just one year because of poor customer service. This is despite the average score for IT service satisfaction reaching 7.2 out of 10 in the enterprise.

A common frustration for British businesses is when IT suppliers do not bother to keep up adequate interaction with their customers. Companies are struggling to answer why, in the 21st century, they are being forced into waiting for a response – or when they do get through to suppliers, why communication is so terrible. Poor response times and low quality of communication were the most frequent customer support failings, Rackspace said,

Managing director at Rackspace, Taylor Rhodes, said in a statement that there are a “staggering amount” of hours wasted by UK businesses which struggle to manage and control IT service problems. “CIOs are taking note, however, and it is encouraging to see service being acknowledged as a crucial factor in procurement decisions along with price, security, and uptime guarantees,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes said that satisfactory service is not good enough in the current climate. “In today’s highly competitive business environment, customer support is a crucial factor,” Rhodes said.