Substantial investment as Revenue admit poor service
HMRC recently announced that it is allocating £45 million to improve customer service, as it released statistics which showed an inconsistent call handling performance in 2014-15. These revealed the following for the period January 2014 – March 2015:
|
Total attempts made to call HMRC |
Calls answered | Calls not answered including busy | Calls recieving a busy message | Not answered excluding busy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 64,782,747 | 46,965,846 (72.5%) | 17,816,901 (27.5%) | 7,244,652 (11.2%) | 10,572,249 (16.3%) |
The money will be used to pay for approximately 3,000 additional staff to join customer service teams, in addition to around 2,000 staff who are being moved over from other parts of HMRC to help with the tax credits deadline and letters and forms.
During a year HMRC receives in excess of 60 million calls, peaking around key deadlines such as 31st January for Self Assessment, and 31st July for tax credits renewals.
The statistics show that while 73% of calls were answered last year, service standards were inconsistent across the year, with some months falling well short of HMRC’s 80% target. The figures also show that in some months as many as 20% of taxpayers heard a busy tone and could not join a phone queue.
Lin Homer, HMRC Chief Executive, accepted that standards had not been good enough and outlined the actions that HMRC has already taken to improve customer service, including recruitment and investment in technology. She said:
“Despite our best efforts, our call performance hasn’t been up to scratch and we apologise to all those customers who have struggled to get through to us.
Good customer service is an absolute priority for HMRC. We set ourselves the target to answer 80% of calls, to provide a more consistent level of service across the year and to reduce peaks and troughs in service levels between busy and quieter times.
While we were successful in tackling the busiest peaks for Self Assessment and tax credits customers, we didn’t meet our call handling target overall and we didn’t provide the consistent service to which we aspired.
We have gripped this issue and recruited around 3,000 new staff in our customer operations and moved around 2,000 people from other parts of HMRC temporarily to support customer service in the run-up to the 31 July tax credits deadline.
We are already seeing the benefit of this, and we are answering 60-70% of calls on tax credits helplines. Tax credits renewals overall are more than 211,000 up on the same time last year.”
Ms Homer went on to say:
“We have also invested in new telephone equipment, which lets us switch calls to many more offices, not just take them in contact centres, so more of our staff can help customers at the busiest times.
Our new online services are also giving customers new and better ways to deal with HMRC and I urge all customers who can go online to do so. For services like tax credits, it’s quick, simple and can be done anywhere any time, including from a smart phone.”
That HMRC have woke up to their poor service and are seeking to redress the problem is to be acknowledged but throwing money at it won’t solve matters if the quality of service remains substandard.
I phoned and e mailed so many times that in the end I wrote them a letter (remember letters?) That was in April. Still waiting for a reply