The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) has announced out that its Customer Experience department were awarded 7th place in the Top 50 Companies for Customer Service, run by GfK.

For more than a decade, the Top 50 Companies has identified and rewarded excellence in customer service. Success at this year’s awards sees CIM join a very select list of brands who offer exceptional customer service.

During 2018, Top 50 Companies’ annual mystery shopping service measured the performance of over 300 major brands, across all of the most widely used service channels: telephone, email, social media and live web chat.

After coming 14th last year, CIM have this year placed 7th overall, including an individual channel award for coming 3rd for telephone service, against competitors including Amazon, John Lewis, Emirates and Sky.

Discussing the news, Kate Gardhouse, director of customer experience and operations at CIM, said: ‘With the standards of customer service rising all the time, we are immensely proud of this result, and of the hard work put in by the Customer Experience department at CIM to achieve this. The improvement year-on-year that we have seen in the standard of our customer service is a testimony to the continued efforts of CIM to put its members at the heart of what we do, and we feel this achievement demonstrates our commitment to doing so.’

When the news broke, Chris Daly, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, was one of the first to commend the customer service team, saying: “It’s been quite a year for our customer service team. As a business we’ve invested in ensuring we deliver a first-class customer experience and the results are clear to see. More staff than ever are pledging their long-term future to the team and service levels are improving across all metrics (including PCA and CSAT). It’s great to see our members and the industry share our opinion regarding the team’s performance.”