A Safe Pair of Hands: 20 Years in the RIFT

The Channel Tunnel is rightly considered one of the great wonders of the modern world. At 25 miles long it’s the longest under-sea tunnel on Earth – and at 25 years old, it’s seen traffic equivalent to 6 times the UK’s total population passing through in one direction or the other. and sees 500 undersea train trips a day at speeds reaching nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour.

What you might not know about Eurotunnel is that it’s also, indirectly, one of the main reasons why RIFT exists.

On a frosty morning back in 1999, I was struck by the sight of an elderly construction worker on the Eurotunnel site, trekking his way across a muddy field to microwave a jacket potato for his lunch. Construction is hard, demanding work – but I knew there was a way to lighten that man’s load a little, getting back the tax he was owed by HMRC.

Now, as RIFT reaches its 20th anniversary in 2019, I’m proud to say we've claimed back ￡200m for our customers and we’re still fighting to ease the burdens on the UK’s construction workers – and so many more besides.

Construction was, of course, a very different business back in the 90s. For one thing, you could more or less walk right onto a building site and talk to anyone working there – which is exactly what I did in the early days.

Industries change, and customers’ needs change with them. At RIFT, we’ve never believed in the business myth of the “one-size-fits-all” solution. Tax and finances are just far too complex for that. Instead, we build our services around what our customers need – and as those needs develop with time and circumstance, we always adapt to keep up.

That’s one of the key secrets to really great customer service, and it’s why we have customers who’ve been coming back to us year on year for a decade or more, Mark Pearce, for example, a steel fixer from Wales who we've claimed ￡33k back for over the last ten years. It's why we believe it's so important so educate people about claiming. It's worth a significant amount of money over your working life.

RIFT was founded on outstanding customer service, and with so many of our customers finding us through word of mouth we’ve never rested on our laurels. In January, the Institute of Customer Service published its Net Promoter Score (NPS) figures – basically, a measure of how willing your customers are to recommend you. The top-performing sector was retail, with an average NPS of +44, while the lowest was utilities with -4.2. RIFT’s NPS for this period was an amazing +79, showing exactly how important it is for a business to inspire satisfied customers to spread the word.

This is where RIFT’s representatives really come in. Fantastic customer service is about going the extras mile – and in our case that’s very much literal. RIFT reps reach out to people up and down the country on construction sites, MOD bases and more. It’s not about “drumming up business” with a flashy, but ultimately hollow, pitch. It’s about building the kind of lasting relationships that let you really understand your customers.

These face-to-face relationships are incredibly important to the way we work with people. Customers need to know that they mean so much more to us than the bottom row of numbers on a balance sheet. RIFT’s customers are our family. We make a point of getting to know them, meeting either at work or at home - because behind every tax refund there’s a human story. It’s inspiring to be able to help steer so many of those stories in the right direction.

As people’s businesses and lives develop and evolve over the coming years, we’ll be right there with them – offering the best, most relevant services we can and never leaving them stranded when the going gets tough. That’s the story of the first 2 decades of RIFT – and it all started with a tunnel, a potato and an opportunity to help.