The mobile phone industry is incredibly competitive. The big providers are constantly battling against each other to slash the price of their contracts and provide better packages to retain customers and attract new ones. However, many of the mobile phone providers have come under a lot of criticism in the last year for the failings of their customer service.

02, one of the major mobile phone providers has just announced the appointment of Professor John Murphy of Manchester Business School (MBS) as Chair of Customer Management. In his biography on the MBS website, it states:

“…he has established a unique cohort of PhD scholarship students in conjunction with leading UK companies. These students are specialising in service quality/customer retention research with an emphasis on issues which have a practical relevance to industry. This is the largest doctoral research group in this specialist area in Europe.”

It is comforting to see during these tough times, such a large organisation is concerned enough with its customer service to appoint a specialist in the field.

Many companies in the UK could do worse than investing in customer service training and the personal development of their key customer service staff, to ensure they improve their customer retention at what is a critical time.