Our Service Charter makes commitments about the service we provide at different stages of our process. We use these commitments to measure how well we are delivering our service and understand where we need to improve.
We developed our Service Charter with people who have used our service and the organisations we investigate and work with, to find out what matters to them. We publish our performance on a quarterly basis.
Recent changes we have made
We now capture feedback from organisations we investigate as well as complainants to provide a better view of our service from those who use it. We will publish the feedback from both of these sources in our quarterly performance dashboard.
In addition, responding to a recommendation made by Parliament, we are currently exploring how best to get feedback on Commitment 10 (whether people feel we have made an fair, impartial decision) from both organisations we investigate and complainants in a way that is not affected by the outcome reached on the complaint.
To start this, our independent research company recently conducted its first focus group with complainants who have recently used our service on this issue and will begin to conduct
in-depth focus interviews with similar complainants to explore this further, including how any question around impartiality can best be framed.
We will share the findings of this research programme – and how best to get relevant feedback on impartiality - once it has concluded in early 2020, and will put in place any recommendations arising from this research in the spring.