LONDON, October 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

The Top 50 companies for Customer Service have been announced, which sees Tesco, ASDA, Nationwide, Barclaycard and Dignity Caring Funeral Services being re-introduced to the prestigious Top 50 circle. Odeon, First Rate, American Express, Molson Coors and Screwfix are all new entrants for this year. To view the rankings in full please visit http://bit.ly/12o9QRV      

The Top 50 is the largest benchmarking exercise for customer service within UK business, based on real customer interactions. This year, it has found the average scores improved to their highest level such as the prized telephone calls category, which saw an average score of 96% in customer service satisfaction achieved across the top 10 participants.

Category leaders announced included:

• Customer service in telephone calls:
• First Rate
• Dignity Caring Funeral Services
• Denplan

• Customer service in live chat:
• bpha
• Better Bathrooms
• Phones4U

• Customer service in social media:
• QVC
• Affinity Water
• Nationwide

• Customer service in email:
• Dignity Caring Funeral Services
• Denplan
• First Rate

The Top 50 report was made public at the Westminster Park Plaza to an excited and passionate crowd of over 700 attendees. The evening was hosted by Josh Widdicombe and Rachel Riley.

This year's report was compiled under stricter criteria to reflect customers' expectations and keeping up with digital demands. Changes made include:

• The number of working days deemed acceptable for receipt of a holding/acknowledgement email and a full email response being reduced from 10 to 5 working days
• Staff received marks for product/technical knowledge for a specific enquiry within the email benchmarking
• The number of working days deemed acceptable for a response to a tweet being reduced from 3 to 2 working days    

Raj Dattani, Programme Director, UBM Live, said:

"The programme allows our members to see exactly how they compare against some of the best and provides a pin point analysis on the areas of opportunity to improve their customer service. With the support of our members, who open their doors to each other, we are seeing that customer service has improved by an average of 13.2% over the last 7 years for those involved".

The Top 50 is run in partnership with GfK Mystery Shopping, one of the UK's leading independent market research organisations. It is the only benchmarking service to use real customers to provide analysis across calls, email, live chat and social media.

The report is based on an extensive programme of mystery shopping. Assessors, who are actual and potential customers, engage with member contact centres and make either simple or complex enquiries. They record what happens during their phone conversation, email, live chat and social media channels.

For more information, please visit: http://www.callcentre.co.uk/top50/

Notes to editors: 

About UBM Live, organisers of the Top 50 

UBM Live connects people and creates opportunities for companies across five continents to develop new business, meet customers, launch new products, promote their brands and expand their markets.   Through premier brands such as MD&M, CPhI, IFSEC, TFM&A, Cruise Shipping Miami, the Concrete Show and many others, UBM Live exhibitions, conferences, awards programs, publications, websites and training and certification programs are an integral part of the marketing plans of companies across more than 20 industry sectors.

For more information, go to http://www.ubm.com

SOURCE UBM Live