Research from the Institute of Customer Service, the body behind the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI), found that 41% of UK customers who are dissatisfied with a business simply stop using it. Just 1.5% say they’d go on to spend more with that business. In other words, unhappy customers don’t leave a paper trail, they just quietly disappear.
Real-time trading data can show that a site is underperforming, a promotion is falling flat, or queues are affecting throughput. What it cannot always tell you is how the customer experienced it or why they may decide not to return.
That gap matters even as the UK’s overall picture on customer satisfaction is, on the surface, looking better. The UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) reached 78.3 out of 100 in its July 2026 release, up a point on the year before. But look closer at the five dimensions the Institute tracks, and complaint handling remains the weakest by a wide margin, scoring just 63.8 out of 100, even as everything else improves. Businesses are getting better at service overall, but still worst at the one moment that tells them something’s gone wrong.
Why this matters more if you run more than one site
If you run a single venue, a missing signal is a nuisance. If you run twenty, fifty or two hundred, it’s a blind spot that potentially comes with reputational damage and a price tag – with the Institute’s own research has repeatedly linked poor service directly to cost.
A quarterly survey or an occasional complaint tells you very little about site 14 compared with site 87, customers may have plenty to say, but if giving feedback requires too much time or effort, many simply won’t bother. Making it quick and easy gives businesses a much more current and consistent view of the customer experience across every location.
What that looks like in practice
This is exactly the gap Encore was built to close. A simple tablet-based rating point, placed at the point of experience – by a till, service counter, exit or front desk. No app or QR code required, just a few seconds of a customer’s time. A low score triggers a real-time alert, so a bad experience can become an opportunity to investigate while the experience is still fresh, and a same- day fix instead of a customer who quietly never comes back.
For multi-site operators specifically, that means something a complaint box or a comment card never could: a single, comparable view across every location. By making things easy and instant, it means capturing the 41% who’d otherwise say nothing at all.
It’s already changing how teams work, not just what they measure
We don’t just believe this in theory. Here’s what one of our own customers, a Catering & Retail Systems Manager, had to say after putting Encore to work across their sites:
“Just wanted to say how fantastic Encore is, it looks amazing and provides really comprehensive and easy to read data!! Kudos to you guys!!!”
That’s the kind of reaction we hear when a team goes from guessing to actually seeing what’s happening, site by site, in real time.
This isn’t just a hospitality story
The businesses feeling this gap hardest aren’t only restaurants and hotels. Retail chains losing quiet customers at the till. Leisure operators watching memberships lapse with no warning. Contract caterers needing evidence to bring back to a client review. Transport operators, councils, heritage sites and any customer-facing business running more than one location has the exact same blind spot, just wearing a different uniform.
The organisations that treat this the way the UKCSI data suggests they should, as a genuine cost to be managed rather than a soft metric, are the ones who’ll be fixing problems in real time while everyone else waits for a customer to eventually complain, if they ever do.
See it for yourself
If you’re running multiple sites and want to know what’s actually happening at each of them, not next quarter, but today, it’s worth seeing Encore in action.
Book a demo or explore more at encorefeedback.co.uk
