UK Customer Service Roles: A Visual Report

Customer service is undoubtedly a very important role to fill regardless of where your business is located or what industry you’re from. And since it has such a big presence, the trends are ever-changing. From a rise in remote working to an increase in expectations, both from businesses and customers – there’s a lot we can learn from these trends.

So which cities have the most and least customer service jobs available? What are the most searched terms related to customer service? Which industries are saturated with the most customer service roles right now? We’ve attempted to answer these questions and many more in our visual report below.

For this report, we used a variety of different sources to uncover a range of data and get a feel for the landscape of the current customer service job market across the UK. This report looks at cities with the most and least customer service jobs available, the most in-demand foreign languages within UK customer service, trends in remote working demand in customer service, most hiring industries, and customer service jargon.

London was the city in the UK with the most customer service jobs available within a 10-mile radius, with around 9.9k jobs available. As the capital of England, this should come as no surprise, really.

In second place was Lichfield with almost 3.7k roles available. This is slightly more unusual given the much smaller size of the Staffordshire cathedral city.

Salford and Manchester are two cities located in very close proximity to one another, which is most likely the reason that they have ranked so closely together in third and fourth place. However, it turns out that Salford (3k) had slightly more customer service roles available than Manchester (2.8k). Considering Manchester is the bigger of the two, it’s unexpected to see Salford ranking higher.

Moving slightly to the east, there were three cities in Yorkshire & The Humber ranking in the top 10 for cities with the most customer service roles available, including Leeds (1.7k), Bradford (1.6k), and Wakefield (1.6k).

The West Midlands also had two cities in the top 10. These were Lichfield with 3.7k roles available, and Birmingham with 1.8k customer service jobs.

Londonderry was the city in the UK with the least customer service jobs available within a 10-mile radius, with just 46 available jobs at the time of data analysis. In second place was Armagh, with just two more roles available than in Londonderry.

The top three cities with the least customer service roles available were all based in Northern Ireland: Derry, Armagh & Newry. This could either be because customer service isn’t in demand right now in this area, or because all the necessary roles have been filled.

Meanwhile, three Scottish cities landed in the top 10 for cities with the least customer service roles available, including Perth (93), Dundee (122) and Stirling (148).

The requirement for customer service representatives that can do their job in multiple languages is something that is really interesting within this job market.

French was the number one foreign language in demand for customer service roles in the UK, with more than 1.7k jobs available at the time of the search. This was followed by German (1.5k job ads) and Italian (1.3k job ads).

French, Italian, Spanish & Portuguese all made the top 10 list, which is probably because these are some of the most spoken languages worldwide after English. These are all also romantic languages!

Retail & Wholesale was the biggest hiring industry for customer service by a huge lead, with over 16.2k jobs available in the UK at the time of the search. This was followed, albeit not so closely, by Human Resources & Staffing with just under 8.7k roles, and Restaurant & Food Services with just under 5.4k.

We found that 20,000 different words were used across the customer service job adverts analysed.

Unsurprisingly, “customer” was the number one term used with 273 appearances, accounting for 1.4% of the 20,000 words. This was followed by “service”, which we found was used 173 times (0.9% of the 20,000 words).

Other top performers included words such as “team”, “experience” “support” and “skills”.

This suggests that employers are trying to use more unique words to bring in new customer service staff since there seems to be a wide range used in the adverts.

TFL was the most in-demand company in the UK for customer service job hunters, with an average of 1,000 searches each month. This was followed by Amazon with 530 average monthly searches, and British Airways and Barclays, each with 220.

Other top performers included TV, phoneline and internet providers BT (210) and Sky (190), alongside the popular online banking app Monzo with 140 monthly searches.

CRM was the most-searched definition, out of the glossary of customer service jargon with around 18.3k average monthly search volumes in terms of finding the definition and understanding what it is.

This was followed by SLA (8.4k avg. monthly searches), and surprisingly Customer Service itself, with just under 4.5k average monthly searches!

60% of the terms on the top 10 list were abbreviations, such as NPS, BPO and IVR. This could be because these terms are used in job adverts, but it could also suggest that people want to educate themselves on the typical jargon used in customer service.

As we can see, the trend for remote roles in customer service has carried on increasing since 2019 – despite the pandemic now being over. This could suggest that the impact of the pandemic on working habits in customer service has been much more long term.

Each year, we see spikes in January, which could mean that many people would prefer to shift into work-from-home roles following the busy Christmas period.

Well, it’s all good news for customer service professionals, and those looking to get into the industry – there’s more demand for experience customer-facing teams than ever before. Plus, with the supporting technology getting better every year, there has never been a better time to fill a customer service role.