How we're improving the complaints experience

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.