Complaints are an important source of feedback and learning as they help us identify and address the issues and concerns of our customers and stakeholders (including MPs and Councillors). Managed correctly and with clear follow through to learning and implementing change, they also help us improve our services and processes, and increase our customer satisfaction.
We know that an important part of managing complaints effectively is to meet the expectations of our customers. We want to be able to demonstrate that all complaints are taken seriously and that processes, policies, and behaviours have changed where analysis shows that customers have complained about a service.
On each individual complaint, where there has been service failure, we collaborate with managers, and communicate with customers about what we will put right, and the changes we will make to ensure that type of service failure does not happen again.
Significant change has taken place in RBH over the last eighteen months and the complaint handling service has continued to be developed over this time. We want to embed the changes because we want to continue to improve.
Our plans for improving the service further are:
- To carry out a full review of how the service is delivered, taking into account, customer and employee feedback, performance and good practise from others.
- To ensure that any learning is shared back to the service area for which complaints are made so that the same mistakes are not repeated. We already have bi-monthly Customer Feedback meetings with our customer facing teams to share trends in complaints, Tenant Satisfaction Measures, transactional surveys, and compliments but we need to embed this further to demonstrate we are learning.
- To ensure that feedback and direction from any cases investigated by the Housing Ombudsman are shared in the organisation to ensure widespread learning when things go wrong.
- To better understand what we can do differently so that customers are satisfied with how their complaints are handled.
- To improve the information we hold about our customers and personalise our approach - this is a priority for the year ahead as we carry out a full customer census.
