The leisure sector has been ranked joint-first with retail-food as the easiest sector to do business with in the latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI).

The index – compiled from a survey of more than 12,000 consumers – found the leisure sector to top the chart with an ease of doing business score of 81.4 (out of 100) – 3.6 points above the average. Leisure ranked third (out of 13 sectors) in the overall UKCSI.

Unsurprisingly, the research from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) also found that individual organisations attaining the best scores for customer effort/ ease of doing business, also ranked highly for key business performance measures.

“Both the leisure and retail-food sectors operate in highly competitive environments, in situations where consumers have many choices of how they spend their time and cash, so it's critical that organisations focus on differentiating through the whole customer experience," said ICS chief executive Jo Causon.

"Moving forward the link between ease of doing business scores and business performance will be vital to determining improvements and forecasting future performance.”

When problems did occur, 66 per cent of leisure customers who had a problem reported it to the organisation – 7.7 per cent lower than the UKCSI average. As with other sectors, the most significant reason for not reporting a problem was the belief that it would not make a difference. For those that did report their problem, 59 per cent used face to face communications whilst only 3.7 per cent used social media.

"The results from the leisure sector should act as a warning for organisations and reinforce the need to provide a consistent service across the channels," added Causon. "A higher than average proportion of customers in this sector do not report problems, suggesting that organisations need to make it easier for customers to give feedback and in some cases, pre-empt possible issues before they happen.”