Policy News Journal - 2012-13

There is a planned £9 million additional investment this year and up to £25 million in 2013-14 to ensure that HMRC reach the call centre industry standard two years earlier than they originally promised to Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee.

HMRC’s press release reads:

The decision to invest in extra staff was taken after close consultation with the Joint Initiative on HMRC Service Delivery (JIHSD), which involves professional bodies and tax charities.

While call centre performance has improved significantly, from 48 per cent of all attempts handled in 2010/11 to 74 per cent in 2011/12, HMRC and JIHSD agreed that more needed to be done to provide a better calls service to customers.

Lin Homer, HMRC’s Chief Executive said:

“Our contact centres receive around 60 million phone calls a year and how well we operate this service is of huge importance to our customers.

“It is vital that when customers call us for help their call is answered – and in a reasonable time. The feedback we get is that the quality of the advice we give when people get through is good, but we haven’t been answering enough calls. “Our target of achieving contact centre industry standards of 90 per cent of calls answered first time is the right target. But after hearing the views of customers, stakeholder bodies and our own staff, we have speeded up our timetable for achieving it. “I believe that we should be providing this important level of customer service sooner, not later, and investment of up to £34 million will enable us to do this by the end of March 2013 and sustain service levels during the next two years, rather than wait until 2015 to achieve the target. It will also enable us to reduce call waiting times drastically.