6 Principles for Effective Complaint Management - Principle 6 - Transparency
PDF - 57KB
PDF - 57KB
Our organisation will:
Transparency is about being open and accountable. A transparent complaint management system and processes will increase trust in your organisation. Recording and analysing data will enhance your organisation’s ability to manage complaints in a consistent, systematic and responsive manner. It will also assist to identify recurring issues and trends and what is needed to improve your operations and service delivery.
In designing and implementing your complaint management system, you should consider your organisation’s size, volume of complaints, functions and customer base. When managing complaints, let people know how you capture this information and that you will treat their personal information confidentially. In circumstances where you may need to share a complainant’s information with another agency, such as through a warm referral, seek their consent.
By accurately and systematically recording and analysing complaints information, your organisation will gain important insights into what processes, services and systems improvements are needed. This data should be both quantitative and qualitive and include, but not be limited to:
Communicate data trends and analysis to all frontline staff and senior management for review and action, where appropriate. It is also good practice to notify members of the public about the changes and improvements made from analysing complaint data. This can be done by publishing the information on your website.
Micha, a council complaint officer, received a complaint from Sahir regarding a lack of response regarding his development application. Micha, along with other complaint officers at council, is required to record all the relevant information about the complaints she manages, including the date received, the staff member allocated to the complaint, time to acknowledge, respond and finalise, the actions taken and remedies, determinations and results.
Tarun, the system administrator, analysed the relevant data from council’s complaint management system. He identified that council had received 10 complaints in the last 3 months about the same issue.
When council investigated the matter further, it discovered that 1 of council’s officers had been allocated too many development applications to process, causing delays. Sahir’s application was one of these. From the data, Tarun also found that the complaints officers who had received complaints about the issue were not always acknowledging the complainants within the required 3 day time frame.
Micha got back to Sahir and explained the issue, apologised and gave him an update about his application. Council also communicated findings about the over-allocation of development applications, and delays in acknowledging complaints, to staff.
Council has an appropriate complaint management system for its size and function. Micha and her colleagues commitment to recording both qualitative and quantitative information about the complaints they receive allowed council to analyse the data to identify complaint trends and areas for improvement.
Council used this data to address Sahir’s concerns with his application, uncover a systemic issue with resourcing for development applications and identify an issue with acknowledgement of complaints. Council was also open and accountable by communicating the outcomes to Sahir and its staff.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and pay our respects to all Elders past and present, and to the children of today who are the Elders of the future.
Artist: Jasmine Sarin, a proud Kamilaroi and Jerrinja woman.