| |
This chapter looks at good
practice in seven important areas of handling complaints. These are:
 | the structure of your organisation; |
| procedures; |
| fairness; |
| training; |
| remedies; |
| attitude; and |
| resources. |
| Sandwell Council give staff a booklet on handling
complaints, called Here's Your Survival Kit. The booklet was produced in June 1997
and is written in a clear, modern style. The first part is about the procedure. The second
is about why customers complain and what people expect from complaining. The final page
asks for readers' views on the booklet or the complaints handling procedure. This list
of dos and don'ts is a good example of the style of the booklet. |
The structure of your organisation
There are two options for dealing with complaints.
| You can deal with them locally through sections and
individual members of staff. This encourages speedy replies and encourages staff to 'own'
complaints. But it may mean that a lot of useful information about complaints is never
brought together centrally to show where improvements can be made.
|
| You can deal with them centrally, through a special
section (generally called the Customer Care or Complaints Section), or through a named
Complaints Officer. This helps you to make sure that complaints are dealt with
consistently, and means that central records can be kept. But it does not encourage staff
at local level to 'own' the complaints. |
The ideal is a blend of the two: local ownership and
replies, but clear central monitoring systems that allow you to identify areas for
improvement.
| On 1 April 1997 the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary was restructured. Apart from
a small number of formal complaints which have to be processed in line with legislation,
complaints are now dealt with at divisional command levels. Divisional commands now deal
with all areas of complaints at a local level and must provide a satisfactory solution to
the complaint. The benefits include quicker solutions and staff 'owning' the issues
raised. The new system also reduces unnecessary bureaucracy. Contact:
Superintendent Robert Ovens, Corporate Services, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary.
Phone: 01387 252112. |
You need to decide which arrangement suits you best,
taking into account the following principles.
| Responsibility for investigating and replying to
complaints should generally lie with the section responsible for the failure in service.
|
| The sections handling complaints should maintain close
links with all parts of the organisation.
|
| There should be a regular two-way flow of staff between a
complaints handling section and other parts of the organisation.
|
| Someone at senior management level needs to be aware of
all complaints across the organisation, and be responsible for making sure that the Chief
Executive or equivalent is kept informed.
|
| As part of their complaints policy, Cardiff County Council have set up a
Departmental Complaints Manager in each department. The responsibilities of the
Departmental Complaints Manager include:
Contact: David Collins, Policy Review, Cardiff County Council. Phone: 029 20 872572. |
If you contract out services you should make sure that
the contract includes a requirement for an effective complaints handling procedure, and
that you monitor its effectiveness.
Procedures
To handle complaints consistently you will need a formal written procedure, which all
staff understand and follow. Your procedure should focus on dealing with complaints
quickly (ideally on the spot) and not on bureaucratic procedures for their own sake.
Consultation
| You should draw up complaints procedures by consulting:
|
| the staff who will operate them;
|
| the members of the public who will use them; and other
parts of the organisation or other public services that provide services to members of the
public.
|
This is to avoid the communication problems that can
arise between:
| different parts of the same organisation, as may happen in
a hospital;
|
| two separate public services, as may happen when paying
benefit giros involving both the Benefits Agency and the Post Office; and
|
| a public service and a contracted-out service, for example
a local authority that has contracted out street-cleaning services.
|
| The Customer Reception Manager from the Preston District Office of the Benefits
Agency visits the local caller offices in Leyland, Chorley and Bamber Bridge every two
weeks to deal with customer complaints face to face. Customers do not need an appointment.
Posters advertising this service are displayed at the local offices. The
Reception Manager also uses the visits to update local office staff on current issues.
Contact: Mike Emery, Customer Service Manager, Benefits Agency, Preston. Phone: 01772
841092. |
Principles for procedures
Your procedures should:
| be written in clear language;
|
| be simple to operate - if they are not, service users
won't bother to complain, and staff may not understand what they are meant to do;
|
| cover complaints about both operational and policy
matters;
|
| be reviewed regularly; and
|
| help staff to provide a speedy solution to a complaint
wherever possible. This involves giving staff the power to offer a suitable reply on the
spot. Saying sorry quickly can save a lot of time, money and effort later.
|
Your procedures should also set and monitor targets for:
| acknowledging complaints;
|
| dealing with complaints;
|
| keeping people informed about the progress of the
investigation if the targets are going to be missed; and
|
| getting contributions or comments from people outside your
organisation.
|
Your procedures need to include all the stages of
investigation and review, and to set out clearly at what point a complaint should go to
the next stage. The four main stages of a complaints procedure are:
| an on-the-spot reply (' informal');
|
| referral, investigation and reply;
|
| internal review; and
|
| external review.
|
| In 1997 Peterborough City Council started using bright orange paper for all
internal complaints documents, so that officers immediately noticed complaints in their
daily post. Contact: Matthew Cross, Policy Unit, Chief Executive's Department,
Peterborough City Council. Phone: 01733 452531. |
Redirecting complaints
If you receive a complaint that should be referred to another part of your organisation or
a different organisation, make sure you let the person who has complained have the name,
address and phone number of the person who will be dealing with their complaint. You
should also give them a date by which they can expect a full reply from that person.
People who complain continually
Your complaints procedure should set out guidance on handling people who complain
continually. This guidance should include:
| details of how to handle difficult customers, in person or
on the phone, and how to deal with their letters;
|
| instructions about a cut-off point, which should be
reached only after a management decision; and
|
| instructions for dealing with any further problems:
further letters from the customer should be checked to make sure that they do not contain
new issues that need a reply. |
How to reply to a complaint
Your written replies should:
| aim to answer all the points of concern;
|
| be factually correct;
|
| avoid jargon;
|
| be signed by the officer responsible;
|
| contain a contact phone number; and
|
| tell the person what to do next if they are still not
satisfied. |
Picking up the phone can be a quicker, cheaper and more
effective way of dealing with a complaint. Remember to record details of the call straight
away. You may still need to follow up with a letter to make sure that there is no
misunderstanding.
| Wolverhampton Health Care NHS Trust sends an acknowledgement letter within two
working days of receiving a written or oral complaint. The acknowledgement letter tells
the customer that someone will phone them to discuss their concerns, to see if there is
anything further they would like to raise, and to reassure them that the Trust takes
complaints very seriously and that the matter will be thoroughly investigated. Often this
is an ideal opportunity to arrange to visit the customer if they prefer to discuss the
matter face to face rather than over the phone. This can take some time for those
investigating the complaint. But the Trust has found that customers - particularly those
who have difficulty getting out of the house - find it very helpful to be able to talk
about their concerns at home. Contact: Michele Fowler, Trust Business Manager,
Wolverhampton Health Care NHS Trust. Phone: 01902 444000. |
Offering a meeting can be an effective way of sorting out
a complaint. People are often pleased to see that you are taking their problem seriously
and are willing to devote time to finding a solution.
The Complaints Policy in Newham Healthcare NHS Trust encourages:
| trust managers to meet people who have complained at an early stage of their
investigation if someone has died or the complaint is complicated; and
|
| people who have complained to meet the chief executive and the trust's complaints
manager if they are not satisfied with the results of the investigation into their
complaint.
|
Contact: Heather Lawrence, Business Manager (Corporate Services), Newham Healthcare NHS
Trust. Phone: 020 8 472 1444. |
Fairness
You should make sure that complaints are dealt with fairly. If a complaint needs internal
investigation it should ideally be looked at by an officer outside the section in which
the complaint arose. That officer should then report to a senior manager. Your procedures
for investigation should be:
| open, advertised, and understood by all those involved in
the complaint;
|
| fair, not biased towards anyone involved;
|
| thorough, involving finding out the relevant facts,
talking to everyone involved, and checking details where possible; and
|
| consistent, treating people in similar circumstances in
similar ways. You should let everyone involved know the decision you reach on the
complaint. |
Confidentiality
Your procedures should protect confidential information, so that:
| users of your services are not discouraged from making
complaints; and
|
| accusations against staff are known only by those staff
and others who are investigating the complaint. |
It is important, though, that managers do not use the
need for confidentiality to avoid drawing up and publishing information about complaints.
They can produce this information without including people's names.
Monitoring fairness
Your confidence in the fairness of your complaints system can be very different from your
customers' confidence. You should monitor complaints, to make sure that no one is being
treated unfairly. This might involve:
| monitoring some completed complaints cases every month;
and
|
| carrying out surveys of people who have made a complaint,
asking them if they were happy with how their complaint was handled.
|
Fairness for staff
You should also make sure that staff are treated fairly if a complaint is made against
them. This involves:
| telling them immediately and fully about any complaint
against them;
|
| giving them an opportunity to tell their side of the
story; and
|
| keeping them informed of progress and the result of
investigating the complaint.
|
Training
Handling complaints about the service is as much part of the job as providing the service.
All staff should know your complaints procedures, and be trained to carry out their
responsibilities. You need to identify the particular skills needed by staff who have
regular contact with users and who handle complaints. You should include these skills in
recruitment and training.
Training should cover:
| your complaints handling procedures;
|
| communication skills, such as listening, questioning and
calming;
|
| the benefits of handling complaints well and the results
of handling them badly; and
|
| your policy framework. (Staff need to know how to deal
with complaints about policy even if they cannot change things.) |
Training should:
| be continuous, with regular refresher courses; and
|
| aim towards a formal qualification at the end such as an
NVQ or an internal certificate.
|
| H M Customs and Excise include a self-assessment exercise at the end of their Handling
Complaints training booklet. The introduction to the exercise explains: The
questions are designed to focus your attention on to some of the critical elements within
the system and, at the same time, to test your understanding of the Departmental
complaints handling system as a whole try to answer them as quickly and honestly as you
can (this way, you will see, at a glance, which - if any - aspects of the system you are
less up to speed with). On the page following the self-assessment exercise, each
question is cross-referred to the relevant section of the main text containing the answer.
This allows the reader to assess their learning quickly by comparing their replies with
what it says in the booklet. Contact: David Cheyne, Continuous Improvement Team, HM
Customs and Excise. Phone: 020 7 865 5743. |
Recruiting staff
When recruiting staff whose jobs will involve dealing with large numbers of complaints,
you should make sure that candidates demonstrate good communication skills.
Remedies
Providing a remedy is one of the two main reasons for having a complaints system. (The
other reason is to improve services by using the information you get from complaints.)
You should:
| give users the information they need to identify services
that are below standard;
|
| offer a suitable remedy and make sure that staff are aware
of the options;
|
| try to make sure that the remedy is, where possible, what
people want;
|
| recognise that most people want to prevent the same thing
happening to others; and
|
| carry out surveys of your service users to make sure that
they are satisfied with the remedy provided. The person who complained is the only one who
can really measure the quality of your response.
|
Options
Both staff and service users need to know what remedies to a complaint are available. You
should draw up a menu which staff can use when considering what remedy to provide. The
menu should set out the various options, and examples to follow. This will help you to
make sure that responses are consistent and satisfactory.
The menu should include at least:
| an apology;
|
| an explanation;
|
| an assurance that the same thing will not happen again
(monitored to make sure that it doesn't);
|
| action that can be taken to put things right; and
|
| financial compensation. This should always be an option,
even though it may only be relevant in a few cases. Make sure that your users know how to
get financial compensation. Front-line staff should have the authority to make small
payments. |
| The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead's Environmental Health Unit acted on a
member of staff's suggestion to improve people's view of the service's reaction to
complaints. For any complaint, the unit sends a full written reply and then
contacts the person who has complained to find out how satisfied they are with the reply.
If the unit feels the complaint was justified, they provide a voucher (for about £5) for
council facilities. They send the voucher with the full written reply, giving the person
who has complained a choice of facilities to use the voucher on (leisure centres, theatre,
arts centre and park and ride facility).
Contact: Stuart Grice, Environmental Health Unit, Royal Borough of Windsor and
Maidenhead. Phone: 01628 683503. |
You should not see financial compensation as an
alternative to putting things right. This is particularly important if you often make
standard payments when you are not legally required to, for example with vouchers. These
should be seen as goodwill gestures, not a solution to the problem.
In cases of maladministration, you should try to identify
all those affected and offer a suitable remedy. There may be a few cases where identifying
others who may have suffered would be such an enormous task that it would affect your
organisation's day-to-day operation or your ability to put right a failure that was the
main cause of the maladministration. In these cases, it would be better to improve your
services and to stop the maladministration happening again.
In the leaflet produced by the Office of the
Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (Parliamentary Ombudsman) maladministration
includes:
| avoidable delay;
|
| faulty procedures or failure to follow correct procedures;
|
| not telling a person who has complained about their rights
to appeal;
|
| unfairness, bias or prejudice;
|
| giving advice that is misleading or unsuitable;
|
| refusing to answer reasonable questions;
|
| being impolite and not apologising properly for mistakes;
|
| mistakes in handling someone's claims; and
|
| not offering a suitable remedy when one is necessary.
|
You should always consider whether maladministration or
failing to meet a standard has caused worry and distress to the service user and whether
this needs to be taken into account when deciding on the right remedy. You should also
provide a remedy if the complaint has been handled in a way that is itself
maladministration. Financial compensation will only be justified in a small percentage of
such cases.
Attitude
Formal procedures may not be enough to make a complaints system effective. Staff should
have the right attitude towards complaints. This involves:
| listening sympathetically to people who have a complaint;
|
| recognising that handling complaints is an important part
of customer care and of each member of staff's job;
|
| understanding the benefits of handling complaints well and
the results of handling them badly; and
|
| welcoming complaints as an opportunity to put things right
for the customer and improve services. |
Management
To be effective, complaints systems should be supported by senior management. Management
should:
| regularly review complaints information; and
|
| make sure that complaints handling is built into the
organisation's corporate and strategic plans, and covered in annual reports.
|
Management can start to demonstrate their support for
good complaints handling by sending a notice to all members of staff stressing the
importance of complaints and the benefits of handling them well.
Chief Executives or equivalents in all public services
should be held personally responsible for effective complaints handling. And this should
be reflected in job descriptions and performance appraisals, including decisions on
performance-related pay.
Supporting your staff
It is the front-line staff in organisations who most often have to deal with complaints.
You should recognise these pressures and give staff as much support as possible to do
their jobs well. You should:
| make sure that complaints are seen as part of overall
customer care;
|
| create a team spirit so that individuals do not feel
isolated and members of the team can support one another;
|
| recognise complaints handling as an important part of
everyone's job;
|
| involve staff in developing complaints procedures;
|
| give staff the power to deal with complaints, so that they
feel they 'own' them;
|
| provide suitable resources (including training) so that
staff can handle complaints properly;
|
| make sure that complaints handling has status within the
organisation and is considered a career opportunity;
|
| recognise and reward staff who handle complaints well;
|
| allow staff who handle complaints regular breaks to do
other work; and
|
| display thank you letters and action taken to improve
services as a result of complaints. |
To develop customer relations, Swale Borough Council has made customer care, including
handling complaints, part of performance appraisal for all staff. It is particularly
important for front-line staff. The council's view is:
For staff who deal direct with the public, the assessment of their ability to
handle customers well is a major determinant of their appraisal. More importantly, the
appraisal itself reaffirms the Council's commitment to customer care and provides these
staff with the opportunity to say what they feel is going well or badly in this area and
what help they want to do the job better.Contact: Lilie Broad, Public Relations
Officer, Swale Borough Council. Phone: 01795 417399. |
'Blame culture'
2.39 A 'blame culture', where members of staff are criticised for being the subject of
complaints, only leads to a situation where staff fear complaints. They then try to brush
them under the carpet, and deal with them negatively or even with hostility. To avoid
this, you need to:
| create an environment in which complaints are seen as
opportunities to improve services or systems; and |
| make sure that staff feel confident that procedures
support them. |
| First Community Health NHS Trust is committed to a positive approach to complaints.
To make sure that the complaints system is not seen as intimidating or negative, it is
referred to as 'Are you satisfied? ' rather than as a complaints procedure. All staff
receive training to help them to be skilled and confident in responding quickly, fully and
fairly to complaints. Contact: Alan Sharville, Director of Organisational
Development, First Community Health NHS Trust. Phone: 01785 222888. |
2.40
You also need to:
| encourage staff to learn from the experience and develop a
better understanding of the service user's point of view;
|
| identify weaknesses in systems; and
|
| separate complaints procedures from disciplinary
procedures. There may be times when a complaint does lead to disciplinary action, but as a
general rule complaints should be handled under their own separate procedure.
|
Resources
2.41
Handling complaints should not take up too much time or too many resources. You can
introduce several schemes without using a lot of resources. You can, for example:
| include more information about the stages of the
complaints procedure (and the ombudsman) in your next complaints leaflet
|
| distribute complaints information more widely, such as to
local voluntary groups, libraries, and the press;
|
| ask people who complain what they want you to do;
|
| answer complaints by phone rather than by letter; l send
staff a statement from senior management confirming the importance of dealing with
complaints properly;
|
| consult staff about the complaints handling procedure and
about drawing up a menu of remedies;
|
| delegate the power to sort out complaints to the lowest
possible level; and
|
| meet representatives of service users to discuss concerns
and complaints. |
2.42
Managers should be aware of the cost of handling complaints at each stage of the
procedure. They should recognise that costs rise steeply as complaints go higher up the
organisation. Using resources to deal with complaints quickly and effectively is likely to
be the most cost-effective option.
Handling checklist
| Area of concern |
Your current position |
Action you need to take |
| Encouranging front-line staff to 'own' complaints |
|
|
| Having formal written procedures |
|
|
| Consulting staff and users on the procedures |
|
|
| Setting deadlines |
|
|
| Making sure investigations are fair |
|
|
| Providing training for all |
|
|
| Drawing up a 'menu' of remedies |
|
|
| Encouraging the right attitude and avoiding a 'blame culture' |
|
|
|
