North West-based housing provider Guinness Northern Counties’ customer service centre was officially named the best in the UK this week when it scooped first place in the Top 50 Call Centre Awards for Customer Service in the UK’s biggest ever call centre benchmarking exercise.
The not-for-profit housing association, which is part of The Guinness Partnership, achieved first place in the Small Centre, Public Sector and Overall categories, beating off strong competition from 150 other organisations including household names such as Google, Lloyds TSB, Barclays, ASDA and insurance giants Aviva.
Each call centre was rated using over 50 criteria across five key areas of service – timeliness, ease of use, reliability, staff knowledge and personalised service.
The rigorous assessment, conducted by independent market research company GfK Mystery Shopping, involved around 300 mystery shopper calls to the centre over six months. It showed that 97% of customers got through to the call centre on their first attempt, with 96% of callers feeling that their enquiry was completely resolved and resulted in Guinness Northern Counties achieving the competition’s highest ever score of 95.21%.
The centre which operates from the association’s head office in Hollinwood, near Oldham, employs 50 staff and is open 24 hours a day. It offers advice, information and practical assistance to customers from the association’s 26,000 homes on everything from repair requests and rent payments, to problems in their neighbourhood such as vandalism or anti social behaviour.
Staff and managers from Guinness Northern Counties learned of their success at a gala awards presentation on 28/9/11 at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, hosted by TV presenter Gabby Logan.
Speaking after the ceremony, Penny Bayley, Guinness Northern Counties’ Director of Customer Services, said: “We are all completely overwhelmed to have been named the very best call centre in the UK, especially given the quality of organisations we were benchmarked against and the extremely rigorous, independent assessment process. It’s a massive tribute to the staff we employ at the centre and their commitment to really making a difference to our residents.”
The study, now in its fourth year, was commissioned by the UK’s Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service, a programme organised by Call Centre Focus magazine, to raise customer service standards in the call centre industry. The research consisted of 18,500 mystery shopping enquiries to over 50 of the UK’s leading call centres, across five sectors – retail & distribution, financial services & insurance, utilities, public services and entertainment, leisure & travel.
The result represents a climb of 5 places in the top 50 for Guinness Northern Counties, which was ranked 6th in the country in last year’s survey.