Providing an exceptional user experience
Our values of impartiality and fairness drive everything that we do. In living those values it is vital that we give people and organisations the best possible experience of working with us.
Our previous strategies placed a greater emphasis on improving the quality of our decisions. We now have a mature quality framework and produce high-quality decisions.
Over the next year, we want to place greater emphasis on delivering a better overall user experience. This will largely be driven by our digital transformation which will make it easier to submit complaints to us and track their progress.
We will expand our Early Consideration approach to speed up decisions on whether we will investigate complaints. We will communicate these directly to complainants over the phone or through virtual meetings.
We know many people have to navigate complex processes and steps before we can consider their complaint. We will continue our work to raise standards of complaint handling through our Complaint Standards and create partnerships to help public service users receive a better complaints experience.
Our aims on user experience are to:
- expand our digital self-service offer to encourage submission of complaints and evidence online
- develop our highly trained workforce further to increase the focus on overall user experience
- create partnerships to help public services improve their handling of complaints to rebuild trust
- incorporate the latest thinking of behavioural science to improve our processes
- create a new framework for the effective measurement of user experience
- enable automatic notification of complaints to the organisations we investigate.
Early Consideration approach
The Early Consideration approach is a set of different actions a caseworker can take to resolve a complaint in a proportionate way. This may involve focusing on the issues that matter most to the person complaining, considering what evidence we need to reach the right decision, or sharing decisions on the phone.