Flimsy excuses and guesswork are patching together customer service across Europe, according to the results of new research announced today. Commissioned by BT, the survey of household names in eight European countries claims to be highlighting the lack of integration between departments handling customer relations.

According to the survey, 95% of European businesses surveyed were unaware that an e-mail had been sent when contacted by the same individual asking the same question by telephone. Furthermore, the same question asked via e-mail and the telephone elicited inconsistent responses in 85% of cases.

The research appears to show that amongst the countries surveyed the least well integrated were businesses are in Spain and Germany, where not one company knew that a customer had e-mailed and telephoned asking the same question. However, France, Ireland and the Benelux appear to have fared marginally better, with an average of 4% of connected customer queries, the UK was ahead of the field with 15% giving coherent responses.

Consistency of response was similarly hit and miss across telephone and e-mail contact. The UK again leads the way with just over a quarter of companies giving the same response to the queries via both telephone and e-mail, falling to just 18% in France and 16% in the Benelux countries. In both Spain and Ireland, more than 90% of companies provided different responses to the same question.

The head of CRM marketing at BT, Ian Seedhouse, commented that if channels of communication are not linked, then businesses will not benefit from their investment.

'Customers dealing with a business expect people within that organisation to be connected with each other. If this does not happen and they find themselves endlessly repeating the same information, customers will take their business elsewhere,' he added in remarks to IT journalists about the reports findings.