Following an open and fair process
| Commitment |
Quarter 2 (July-Sep 2019) |
Change from Quarter 1 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Complainant feedback | Organisations we Investigate feedback | Complainant feedback | Organisations we Investigate feedback | |
| 5. We will listen to you to make sure we understand your complaint | 69% | 84% | -5% | +2% |
| 6. We will explain the specific concerns we will be looking into | 89% | 88% | +3% | -2% |
| 7. We will explain how we will do our work | 86% | 90% | +15% | -4% |
| 8. We will gather all the information we need, including from you and the organisation you have complained about before we make our decision | 48% | 88% | NC | NC |
| 9. We will share facts with you, and discuss with you what we are seeing | 73% | 85% | +2% | -3% |
| 10. We will evaluate the information we've gathered and make an impartial decision on your complaint | - | - | - | - |
| 11. We will explain our decision and recommendations, and how we reached them | 47% | 90% | -6% | NC |
| Overall section score |
69% | 88% | +2% | -1% |
What the results tell us
Overall we continued to see stable performance in this section. We saw improvements in complainant feedback in a number of areas this quarter. Most notably there was a significant improvement in complainant satisfaction for how we explain how we will go about looking into the specific issues in their complaint.
Complainant satisfaction for whether we listened and fully understood complaints dropped in Q2. We will emphasise to staff the importance of having meaningful engagement with complainants to demonstrate we fully understand the key issues of their complaint.
Complainant satisfaction for whether we have gathered all the relevant information we need is lower than we would expect and is quite different to organisational satisfaction. This discrepancy may be due to the fact that we often request all of the records the organisation holds on the complaint. This information will often be central to our investigation. Whilst complainants also provide us with their account of what happened, they will often not have to provide records like organisations do. That may impact on their satisfaction that we have gathered all the relevant information.
To help with this, through our quality standards work, we require staff to place more emphasis on engaging with the parties to better explain and share what information we have gathered and used it to arrive at our provisional views. We will continue to monitor how this affects satisfaction in this commitment area.
We also continue to focus on how we can effectively demonstrate to all parties that we are gathering all the relevant information we need to make a decision, with both parties’ satisfaction in this area remaining the same from the previous quarter. This remains a priority for us going forward.
Complainant satisfaction for how we explain our decisions is lower than we want and this is a priority area for improvement. To support staff, we have published new guidance on writing clear decisions and have launched new training modules on report writing. We will also be running further training events to continuously develop staff on explaining our decisions throughout 2020.
We also recently ran a focus group with complainants to get better insight into this area. We will examine this feedback to see what further action we can take to improve this score and put that in place later this year.