An oral report and presentation of the management of complaints and enquiries from Members and MPs.
Minutes:
The Head of Customer Services provided Members with an oral report of corporate complaints for the six month period October 2011 to March 2012. He said that during that period, 78% of the 487 complaints received had been dealt with within 10 working days (the target was 90%). He stated that the majority of customers complained about Housing and Public Protection (150), Customer Services (131) and StreetCare (107). This was to be expected because these three service areas between them reflected the broadest “outward facing” of Council services.
He drew attention to the fact that the majority of complaints were about quality of service (116) followed by service failure (81) and explained that this could be seen as a natural effect of the government cuts to Council funding where some services were either no longer being provide, or that routine tasks were now provided on a necessity basis. On a more positive note, he was please to be able to report that the bulk of resolutions were satisfactory outcomes for the complainants.
A Member observed that there were two figures which caused some concern: 39 complaints were unresolved and 44 were blank. In response, he was informed that the blank outcome had been due to a programming error which allowed officers to close a complaint without completing it properly. This was currently being addressed and in future it would no longer be possible to do this. With regard to the unresolved element, his experience was that some complainants would never be satisfied with the answers they received, whatever was proposed. Some cases were genuinely impossible to resolve because of their unique circumstances and in others, the complainant had simply discontinued the complaint or had sought to pursue it through some other agency: tribunal, courts or Ombudsman.
Members learned that there had been an increase in the number of complaints recorded in the last six months (487) compared to the previous six moths period (376). It was explained that this did not necessarily mean that there were a lot more customers complaining (residents and also from those living outside the borough), but that as the CRM system was more widely applied and staff became more familiar with its use, more complaints were being recorded. The reality of “more complaints” was somewhere between the two figures – but this was a trend which Members had asked to be informed about. He did concede that the resolution of complaints within 10 working days was fewer now than the previous six months, but attributed this, in part, to growing complexity in the nature of some of the issues – and the pressure on resources to provide a satisfactory resolution quickly.
In addition to monitoring complaints, the CRM process recorded Mp and Member enquiries. The Sub-Committee was reminded that there was a distinction between a complaint (where something was perceived to be wrong) and a Member enquiry (where a Member was seeking information) – though it was also pointed out that both were vital in providing indicators to services as to where actual and potential problem areas existed. In answer to a question, the Head of Service said that in addition to receiving complaints, the CRM system was capable of recording compliments and that although initially this element had not been used, it was appreciated that staff morale would benefit from receiving compliments and so this element was now being promoted as well as the effective recording of complaints.
He concluded by informing the Sub-Committee that improvements in the management of complaints was on-going and that policies and procedures were kept under review, training was a feature of staff development and a complaint “champions” group had been set up to co-ordinate the application of the corporate complaints procedure across all service delivery areas, provide feed-back from those services and monitor the quality of complaints handling within their areas as well as contributing to the identification of possible improvements to the complaints process.
A Member asked why there were no figures for Adult Social Care and was reminded that currently Social Services did not record complaints on the Corporate system (the service used its own CRM record), but that this was a position that was to change. Another Member observed that he hoped that it time more processes would become “joined up” in order to make service delivery more straight-forward. Members also asked whether complaints were considered by the Overview and Scrutiny committees and were informed that currently only the Value OSC received regular reports.
The Sub-Committee noted the oral report and recommended that:
1. Chairs of all of the Overview and Scrutiny committees be contacted and invited to consider adding an item to their agendas for receiving and considering complaints pertinent to their areas of responsibility on a regular basis and
2. The Sub-Committee continue to receive reports on complaints whenever it convened and that those reports identified trends, particular issues and provided Members with an update on developments within the management of the complaints process and more importantly, what the individual services/the Council was learning from it.