The gift of complaints

Joe Roberts says complaints should be treated as opportunities to learn and improve

Complaints are often seen as unwelcome, yet they provide valuable learning opportunities for public-purpose organisations. Each complaint is feedback you haven’t had to seek out or invest resources in gathering. When listened to carefully, investigated thoroughly, and acted upon, complaints become a powerful driver of improvement, innovation and positive change.

This means it’s really important to ensure service users know how to make a complaint and that they feel confident to do so without any fear of repercussions. This doesn’t mean your organisation cannot seek to resolve problems and issues informally with a service user before they escalate into a formal complaint—that is a feature of good customer service and management—but it does mean that where matters can’t be resolved in this way, the service user is able to record their complaint formally and have it investigated in an objective way.

Every organisation needs a robust and consistent process to respond to complaints. This starts with acknowledging the complaint promptly, so the complainant knows you have received their grievance and are going to investigate it, and when they can expect a reply.

Not all complaints are equal

You may have a key performance indicator for complaint response times, but setting a uniform target across the board is not a good idea because more complex complaints take longer to investigate. Complainants are usually more concerned about getting a full response than a fast one, and if you are able to agree on individual response target times with complainants, you should do so.

The next stage is to assign the complaint to someone who can investigate it, and for the most serious complaints, this may even be someone from outside your organisation.

Some organisations vary the process depending on the complexity of the complaint and do an initial triage to assess the seriousness of each complaint. If the response starts to fall behind the agreed schedule, you should stay in contact with the complainant and explain the delay.

Once the investigation has concluded, the draft response letter needs to be reviewed for quality assurance purposes by someone other than the person who wrote it. They should read the letter with the following questions in mind:

• Does the letter answer all the points raised in the original complaint?
• Is the letter written in plain English, or is it full of jargon, acronyms and management speak that will confuse and annoy the complainant?
• Is the letter written in an understanding and sympathetic tone, rather than appearing defensive or dismissive of the complainant’s concerns?
• Does the letter make clear what lessons have been learned and what the organisation is doing (or planning to do) to stop it from happening again?

A further issue to consider is who should sign the response letter. In some organisations, the chief executive signs all complaint responses personally. A response from the person at the top shows that the organisation takes complaints seriously, but on the other hand, in larger organisations it can create a bottleneck that delays responses. A sensible approach is for responses to the most serious complaints to come from the CEO, but for other executives to have delegated authority to respond to complaints.

Complaining about complaints

Even when complaints have been fully investigated and responded to clearly and promptly, the complainant may not agree with the conclusion. There needs to be a process through which they can challenge the response they have received. In some sectors, such as the NHS or local government, complainants can take their case outside the organisation to an ombudsman. Where this option does not exist, the organisation should have its own internal process.

The process does not end when a response letter has been sent to a complainant who has accepted the outcome of the investigation. Closing the loop requires sharing learning points from complaints with colleagues – for example through staff bulletins and team meetings—and making lasting changes that improve the quality of services. Receiving numerous similar complaints from different people over several months is usually a sign that this is not happening.

The organisation’s board is ultimately accountable for the quality of the services it provides, and complaints are a good indicator of when quality has fallen short. The board does not usually need to be sighted on the detail of individual complaints in all but the smallest organisations, but it does need high-level information about the number of complaints, common themes, response times and trends. This may form part of an integrated performance report, or alternatively the board (or one of its committees) may receive a report specifically about complaints and service user experience.

It is also helpful for the board to receive information about the quality of complaint responses so it can be assured that complaints are being investigated thoroughly. A good way of measuring this is to conduct a survey of complainants. The number of complaints that are subsequently reopened is also a good proxy measure for how well an organisation handles complaints.

In conclusion, complaints should be seen as an opportunity to learn and improve, even though they sometimes make for hard reading. Organisations need a robust, objective process to learn from complaints and boards need to be sighted on the main themes and trends from complaints.