Last year, we wrote how British tax payers spent around 800 years on hold in total to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). With the new tax year kicking off soon, the organisation plans to deliver a better service.
As part of that approach, it aims to speed up access to its agents by adding voice support to the legendarily bad HRMC phone support system. This should improve the quality and speed of the service.
The new system should prove useful for people who have trouble with the service’s online form-filling exercises. And for those who can’t find the information they need in the HMRC FAQ section.
Your call is important to HMRC
With many people giving up having spent hours on hold, the situation has to improve. To that end, HMRC is introducing a new phone trial, similar to many online banking services. It uses voice recognition to speed up security processes, access HMRC’s services faster, and improve call handling.
If the trial works well, the live service will roll out across HMRC phone services during the rest of the year, in time for the next major tax deadline at the end of 2025.
For security and customer safety, voice prints are encrypted as biometric data. The new feature should help customers get into the queue faster. However, HMRC needs to improve its processes and staffing levels to prevent customers being cut off or for callbacks that never happen.
HRMC would prefer users to seek online support, it even tried to close the helpline for part of last year. However, tax payers will always need individual or corporate support with income and corporation tax, value-added and capital gains taxes among the many other ways the state seeks to generate revenue.