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Revenue and Customs: Telephone Services

Answer

The information requested is provided in the following tables. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have taken "terminated" to mean the number of calls that were played a busy message and which asked customers to ring back later together with the number of calls where the customer was placed into a queue to speak with an adviser, but abandoned the call before being connected.During peak periods, customers who cannot get through on their first attempt often use the redial facility on their telephone to make numerous successive calls which increases the number and proportion of unanswered calls.Performance during peak periods has shown significant improvement with HMRC handling over 74 per cent. of call attempts during the tax credits peak (April to July) in 2009-10 compared with 37 per cent. during the same period in 2008-09. The most recent results from HMRC's customer satisfaction survey shows a result of 89 per cent. for overall customer satisfaction, which compares well with private sector benchmark of 87 per cent.

Month preceding the renewal deadline	Number of busy and abandoned¹ calls (million)	Busy and abandoned calls (as a percentage of call attempts)
July 2009	1.8	32
July 2008	7.4	66
July 2007	2.9	39
August 2006	0.3	10
September 2005	1.6	36

Year/period	Number of busy and abandoned¹ calls (million)	Busy and abandoned calls (as a percentage of call attempts)
2009-10 (April to November)	5.5	23
2008-09	17.2	41
2007-08	7.3	23
2006-07	2.1	8
2005-06	5.4	19
¹ Abandoned, where the call was disconnected after the caller selected an option from the call steering menu, but before being connected to speak to an adviser.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

504 c604W; 308207

Session

2009-10

Subjects

Telephone services Revenue and Customs

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk