Our complaints experience project

Consultation has concluded

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do.

We know that if you have made a complaint, we need to work on rebuilding your trust.

It’s crucial that we understand the reasons behind a complaint and the positive action needed to resolve it.

By reviewing our complaints, we can understand what went wrong and learn for next time.

We’ll be collaborating with a group of customers over the next year to help us review and improve the way we resolve complaints.

Tell us about your experience of making a complaint

Simply share your story below to help us improve the experience.

You can also ask us a question about the complaints experience project.

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do.

We know that if you have made a complaint, we need to work on rebuilding your trust.

It’s crucial that we understand the reasons behind a complaint and the positive action needed to resolve it.

By reviewing our complaints, we can understand what went wrong and learn for next time.

We’ll be collaborating with a group of customers over the next year to help us review and improve the way we resolve complaints.

Tell us about your experience of making a complaint

Simply share your story below to help us improve the experience.

You can also ask us a question about the complaints experience project.

Consultation has concluded
  • Improving the complaints experience in 2022

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    Last year, we worked with a group of customers to understand how we can improve the way we respond to complaints.


    We asked customers to review closed, redacted complaints and use a survey to tell us about how they would have felt if they had received that complaint.


    You told us that there are five key themes we need to consider:

    • Precision and detail
    • Empathy and understanding
    • Making sure we address the whole complaint
    • Being careful when we use standardised wording
    • Proactivity


    We've decided to continue the project into 2022, and we need your help to make it a success! We're going to measure our success against these themes, and against the promises we make to customers, to really get to the heart of what we need to do to give you the best complaints experience possible.


    Could you spare around 3 hours every 3-4 months to take a look at some complaints and give us your views on them? If that sounds like something you'd like to help us with then sign up using the quick poll on the right hand side of the page. We'll drop you a line to give you a bit more information about how the project works and how you can get more involved.


  • What you’ve taught us on the Complaints Experience project

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    We know if you complain, we’re at a point in our relationship where we need to work hard to earn and keep your trust. We’ve been meeting a group of customers every three months since the start of the year, to talk about how it feels to make a complaint to Catalyst. We wanted to understand how to make the best of our investigation and concluding response. Here’s what we’ve learned so far:


    • You like a clear summary of the issue and what action we’ve taken to resolve it, as that helps you to feel heard.
    • You don’t like a standard wording, feeling that it depersonalises our reply.
    • You prefer us to be empathetic, and honest and open, both about where we’ve gone wrong and what we’re doing to put things right.
    • You want us to make sure that we’ve addressed every part of a complaint, and a summary which demonstrates we’ve listened.


    We hope you’ll see a change in the way we’re responding to complaints, but we’re not finished yet. We’d love to work with more of you so we can understand what it feels like to have a complaint resolved by Catalyst.


    If you’ve made a complaint in the last year, why not join the group? Fill in the quick poll to register your interest, and we’ll get in touch to let you know what it’s all about.

    You need to be signed in to add your comment.

  • How we're improving the complaints experience

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    We've been recruiting customers to help us improve our complaints experience. Earlier this month we held an exciting pilot to help us improve how we respond to customer complaints. Our pilot session was attended by five of our engaged customers. We're going to involve everyone who expressed an interest in our project but wanted to test and try our approach with a smaller group of customers. We'll kick off with the project in July when we'll review our first quarter of 2021 closed complaints.

    The complaints experience project will involve us working with engaged customers to seek their thoughts and ideas on how we can improve the way we respond to complaints.

    As part of this project, customers will meet with our complaints resolution team every quarter to review and discuss closed complaints, sharing their feedback on how we can improve our responses to customers. The pilot session helped us design how we’re going to work with all customers involved in the complaints project, going forward from July.

    What did the group review?

    The pilot group were given the outcomes of two unidentifiable closed complaints. We asked them their views on how they felt we investigated the complaint and communicated with customers throughout the complaints process.

    So, what did they tell us?

    The pilot group told us our responses needed to be more precise when demonstrating what we’ve done to resolve the complaint.

    They also said they felt we needed to be more personal and show more empathy and understanding when responding to complaints.

    Another area the pilot group picked up on is being clearer about what we’ve learnt when we’ve failed to deliver on promises, as well as demonstrating how we plan to tackle any issues with poor performance.

    Next steps

    Thanks to everyone who joined our complaints pilot session. We’ll be using the feedback provided, to make sure we’re much clearer and more understanding, when responding to customer complaints. We're going to be offering training to everyone who expressed an interest in our complaints experience project and it's not too late to get involved! Just drop us an email at get.involved@chg.org.uk or complete our quick poll.

    How will we know the group is making a difference?

    We expect to see the learning from the previous quarter’s session reflected in the next set of complaints the group review.

    We’re going to theme future sessions, so we’re guided by customer insight to help us improve our responses to common seasonal customer complaints.