One of the areas we always try and improve is the way we respond to customer feedback. This includes giving a voice to satisfied customers, listening to suggestions for improvement and putting right complaints about services we provide. Broadly the feedback we get falls into three areas:
- Dissatisfaction because we are providing a service badly
- Complaints about the service we provide because our customers do not like the service we have been asked to provide by governments
- Suggestions on both the above about what we could do to improve services
We are always looking at increasing the number of ways in which we provide the opportunity for customers to feedback their views. Some people like to talk face to face; others like to write a letter; some people prefer groups, others one to one; some people like to e-mail, others like to text. When we get feedback we try to respond in a clear and meaningful way:
- If we got it wrong, we acknowledge it, apologise and sort it out
- When services need refreshing or new approaches but governments haven’t yet changed the way they’re delivered, we do three things:
o We change them as much as possible within the scope of what we’re asked to do by a government
o A4e’s policy team spend a lot of time advising, consulting and supporting governments in designing new approaches and ideas
o We aim to give our customers a ‘voice’ by involving them in design and inviting their ideas on what we do
- Where we get suggestions for improving services, we seek to respond to all sensible and reasonable ideas we get
As part of continuing to develop the way we do this, we are launching a simple ‘rating’ system on our web site. We will be asking all our offices, in all our services, to encourage their customers to use this as part of the work we do. It will be open to people to use at home on the web (one ‘vote’ each on this, including me!) and invite business, partner organisations as well as customers (past and present) to click a ‘smiley’ or ‘frowny’ to register their view of services.
As we develop this, we will be moving into an ‘e-bay’ star rating system. We will ask for comments and ideas on services and then periodically publish the results and more importantly what we have done based on the feedback. So, over the next few weeks, take a look and if the system itself can be improved, or you can think of other ways we should collect feedback, please let us know