A third of HMRC callers waiting 10 minutes

Over a third of callers to HMRC helplines are waiting 10 or more minutes for their call to be answered, according to the latest HMRC Contact Centres survey report.

Overall, the median waiting time is around four minutes. But the number of callers waiting 10 minutes or more increased on last year to 35% of the total.

The two best helplines in all areas – including answer time, level of adviser knowledge, etc – were the child benefit and national insurance lines.

In addition, Business tax helplines were quicker than average to get through to than the others.

Overall, HMRC said there wasn’t a significant change between this year’s and last year’s figures. Over 80% of callers rated their experience as very or fairly good this year, with two-fifths of callers finding it ‘better than expected’. The worst were reported to be the VAT and VAT online helplines, which achieved a satisfactory rating of 72% this year compared to 86% last year according to the results based on calls from April 2013 to March 2014.

Full story from AccountingWeb here.