A version of this article appeared in the Municipal Journal as the "The Art of Complaining"

How to give all your customers an opportunity to simply and quickly tell you when things go wrong.

If anyone receives a poor service, they should complain. How else is the service provider going to learn from its mistake? Public services need to be responsive to the views of local citizens and making a complaint should be an easy way for anyone to voice their concern about local services and engage in the decision-making process. A complaint is also free consultation – how many organisations look at past complaints when consulting customers?

Public services have a poor reputation for complaint handling – 55% of people who complain to a local authority are dissatisfied with the complaint handling process (MORI, 2000). But some public services are now recognising the cost-implications of poor complaints handling – dissatisfied customers are more likely to withhold or delay council tax, business rate or rental payments or make unnecessary contacts across the organisation – and are showing both initiative and innovation in their approach to providing quality services.

I hope that an organisation in any sector can find something of interest in this two-part focus on the first public sector complaint management scheme to be certificated to the British Standards Institute’s new complaint management standard (CMS 86:2000).

The Borough of Camden

Camden Council’s 6,500 full-time and part-time employees provide a wide range of services to a wide range of people and is the landlord to over 32,000 tenants and leaseholders. The borough comprises 12 square miles in the heart of London. The borough stretches from Holborn and Kings Cross in the south to Hampstead and Highgate in the north, Kilburn in the west to Camden Town in the east. Camden is home to over 180,000 people and embraces all extremes of wealth and poverty and is one of the few authorities in the country to appear both on the indices of greatest wealth and greatest deprivation.

Camden has one of the most diverse populations of any local authority in Britain. The borough has the third largest Bangladeshi and the second largest Chinese population of the London Boroughs.

The complaints scheme

The council's award-winning corporate complaints team (Charter Mark holders and National Customer Service Awards finalists) is responsible for ensuring access is provided to all customers to a flexible 3-stage complaint scheme (certificated to the new British Standard). Employees are encouraged to fast-track a complaint where a review is unlikely to uncover any new evidence in support of the complaint.

The corporate complaints team regularly develops new projects to improve access and encourage customers to complain when they have a concern about the quality of services.

Camden's 3-stage complaint scheme

• Local resolution : Service manager / Service director
• Review : Chief Executive
• Ombudsman : Local Government Ombudsman

During 2008, this changed from a 4-stage process to a 3-stage process - the previous Stages 1 and Stages 2 combined into the single local resolution stage.

Getting the basic right

If you really want to encourage people to give you feedback about service failures, you should aim to create a level playing field. But first, you need to get the basics right to give customers the information they need to feedback in a structured way.

A complaints helpline

A complaints team should have some of your best employees. They should have in-depth knowledge of your services and be able to facilitate access and ensure complaints are given the right level of priority.

If you want your services to be open to complaints you should consider how you actually market the concept to your customers. Your organisation may already advertise a helpline for 'comments' or have a 'comments form' hidden away somewhere. But what are you really trying to say to your customers? Are you hiding from complaints and do your customers really know that these are your contact points for complaints? If you really want to have a positive approach towards complaints, you need to sell the benefits of complaints to your employees and customers!

Welcome and encourage complaints and customers will be more likely to welcome your attempts to resolve the complaint (and be better customers for you)!

A clearly written complaints booklet and web page

The council has a complaints booklet and form written in clear and simple language (Crystal Mark-ed by the Plain English Campaign). An online version can also be easily accessed on the council's award-winning web site, Camden Connect.

An unrestricted means to complain

Camden also accepts complaints made in writing; over the phone; in person; by fax Minicom or TypeTalk (for the deaf and hard of hearing); in Braille; in any community language.

Quality responses

Camden’s complaints teams subject all replies to complaints to various checks for the use of plain English and general quality of response. Customers also are asked for feedback and the collated information is used to identify employees who may need training or recognition for handling complaints well (over 700 employees have received training on how to investigate and remedy customer complaints in addition to general complaint handling training).

A widely advertised complaints policy

Camden regularly advertises the complaints policy in the “Camden Citizen” magazine. Examples are given of complaints satisfactorily resolved by the organisation. An annual report on the complaints scheme is available on the web site – and the report’s availability is also advertised on the back of the corporate complaints booklet.

Local community centres and citizen advice bureaux

Twice a year, the council sends out complaints booklets and posters to local community centres, citizen advice bureaux, law centres, tenant and resident associations. All council public-access points are regularly audited by complaints staff to make sure complaints publicity information is prominently displayed.

Local press

The council has used the local press to promote new initiatives (such as the complaint scheme for children and young people) and lessons learnt from complaints to give a positive message about the council’s approach to complaints.

Internet and world wide web

Camden has a direct link to its complaints pages from the home page. I have viewed far too many web sites where information on how to complain is hidden away in some dark recess of the web site. Complaints information should be relevant to most areas of your web site and should be easy to access from the home page.

Camden’s Internet guide to complaining not only allows local citizens to complain on-line about council services but also gives clear advice on complaining about other local services including councillor’s conduct, schools, colleges, health services, landlords and government agencies, and again in partnership with trading standards, goods and services purchased on the high street. The guide even has Jasper Griegson’s top ten tips on making an effective complaint!

The on-line complaint form is becoming increasingly popular with customers and 30 or more complaints each month are received in this way. Camden’s customers can also complain online about housing associations and London Transport services. Camden has linked ‘Respond 3’ complaint management software to both the online complaint form and the corporate Intranet to ensure complaints can be passed speedily to the correct team for resolution (the CDC Respond software previously used by Camden has now been replaced with Tagish's iCasework product). Employees can also get up-to-date analysis of trends and performance in complaint handling.

A survey of customers who had used the web site to register complaint gave a 90% satisfaction rating of the handling process!