HM Revenue and Customs has published its latest set of monthly customer service statistics that suggest that, two months after receiving a £51m funding boost, helplines have begun to recover
HM Revenue and Customs appears to have begun the process of improving its handling of telephone enquiries in July – two months after government approved a £50m-plus investment to support service improvements.
There has been a great deal of focus on the tax agency’s helplines so far this year – never more sharply than when the department announced in March plans to significantly scale back its telephone support, including a proposal to close some services entirely for half the year. The aim of the move was to direct more people to use online options.
However, after much criticism, the plans were reversed within 24 hours and, within two months, government announced that HMRC would be provided with an extra £51m in funding to help improve telephone customer-service levels.
The department’s stated target is to successfully answer 85% of all calls made to its helplines. In the 2023/24 year, it achieved a rate of only 66.4%.
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In recent months, performance has fallen well below even this level, with the answer rate falling beneath 60% in March before – seemingly – bottoming out in the first month of the new fiscal year, with a rate of just 53.5% in April. This has bounced back somewhat since then, rising to 60.4% and 59.5% in May and June, respectively.
HMRC’s newly published customer-service statistics for July show another marked rebound to 66.9%. This figure is now ahead of the average for the whole of last year – but remains 18 percentage points below departmental targets. The department received about 3.1 million calls during the month, the statistics reveal.
Phone calls remain the predominant customer-service channel by which citizens engage with HMRC, with monthly volumes of post received standing at 1.4 million in July. The department processed 265,568 online iForms and conducted 93,555 webchats during the month, the statistics reveal.
Overall customer satisfaction stood at 80.7% – an increase compared with the 79.3% figure posted in the previous month, and the 78.6% across the whole of FY24.
The department has also shown improvement in the proportion of “once and done” customer service enquiries, which encompasses users of phone, webchat, and digital tools that are able to resolve their enquiry at the first time of asking. This categorisation applied to 86.3% of users in July, a rise on the June figure of 84.4% and the prior-year monthly average of 82.6%.
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