Sickness and absence is a major issue affecting service delivery and the customer experience, according to new research.

The research, conducted by Redshift Research on behalf of Cognito, surveyed 200 business managers responsible for mobile workers across the UK to examine the key hurdles to delivering service excellence.

Sickness was ranked as the most common problem affecting service delivery (39 percent), followed by traffic congestion (37 percent) and unavailability of staff (36 percent). A quarter (24 percent) of organisations said absenteeism had a large impact on their business operations.

The retail, distribution and transport sectors were more affected by sickness than any others (41 percent).

When asked what their number one service challenge was, the most common responses were listed as absenteeism, punctuality, staff training, staff motivation and speed of response. Other challenges listed include: customer satisfaction, managing customer expectations, and meeting targets (SLAs & KPIs).

Nine percent of organisations said they had no visibility of customer service delivery, while 37 percent cited customer interaction and satisfaction as areas where they would like more visibility.

“The survey results clearly show that visibility of customer interaction and satisfaction is something organisations need and want more of,” said Jonathan Chevallier, Strategic Development Director at Cognito.

The important take-away from the research is that the environment mobile workers operate in is subject to a range of factors outside of their control – businesses must implement contingency planning. HR can be crucial in feeding into contingency plans by finding out directly from workers what issues affect service delivery. The business can then work to mitigate these factors.