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Cunning Caller

Have you heard the one about the customer who could not get through to his bank's call centre? He found the number for the Welsh language service offered by the bank, called them and got through at once and then asked to have the conversation in English. Problem solved. Nifty or not?

A very clear message on problem solving

This is just one of the findings from a survey done by the Customer Care Alliance of customer care in the UK. The survey's particular focus is how good organisations are in resolving their customers' problems. One message stands out - first time resolution is the way to satisfy customers. If you can solve that problem on the first call, you get 42% saying they were 'completely satisfied' with, falling to 2% 'completely satisfied' if resolution took longer than 14 days. This experience - both good and bad - has consequences as the table below makes clear

Impact of Complainant Satisfaction (Customer Care Alliance 2007 - PDF)

The Best are Named - NHS not on list

The survey covers both the private and public sector and sadly the overall verdict is that both sectors are still underperforming in the way they respond to their users who have problems. The survey names the best retailer as Marks & Spencer, best bank First Direct and leading the way in online shopping services Amazon. The NHS will never figure in the list of best problem solver in the complainants' eyes because its processes are lengthy and often involve a commitment of time and resource quite out of proportion to the original event or experience.

A Promise of Simplification

Simplification was offered in the Department of Health's suggestions in their consultation on a new approach to complaint handling which closed last month. The simplification was to abolish stage 2 - the Healthcare Commission involvement. Local resolution arrangements suggested made a distinction between a 'local service response' and an 'organisational response'. Is this simplification?

Not Investigation but Palliative Care for bruised egos

We shall wait and see what everyone else said but our view on NHS complaint handling is that if there is an opportunity to escalate, the service will take it. Local resolution seems to involve such pain with tricky questions around issues of professional hierarchies and competencies linked to the allocation of responsibility and blame. People do not want to seize the nettle of a local solution that risks tainting local working relationships. Easier to   fob the complainant off and push the case away up the escalation ladder.

It seems to me  that the complexities of the NHS complaint handling system often have little to do with the user and their problem. The user's agenda both emotional and practical is simplicity itself compared with the internecine politics of a modern healthcare services management and delivery team. Investigation in this context, it seems to me, is therefore less of an objective process to identify quality failure and more a form of therapeutic palliative care for bruised egos where the passage of time and endless meetings work their healing powers (internally). The user can wait.

This is on my mind because last month we published something about a Which? survey (link to Which? report - PDF) about why people did not complain to the NHS and then the topic came up again in a focus group we were running involving health service users. Their experiences reflected a mix of excellent and really dreadful service – it was a small group but one of intensive health service users and none had complained about what were some appalling incidents. Should they have? They had a lot on their plate already and the last thing they needed was to waste their precious energy and time, better spent on themselves and those they were caring for.

What they needed was an advocacy service to pick up the service failures and get that fixed. Will this be a job for the new LINks?

Leaping the Species Barrier

In a further deployment of what we might call his 'hyperbolic extended metaphor', Andrew Craig updates us - LINks Let Loose at Last - on the latest move of what he called last month the LINks Safari as this initiative moves towards the implementation phase with local authorities inviting bids from people interested in setting up and supporting the new networks. Now the metaphor has been extended to embrace the challenge of merging health and social care - beasts of very different DNA. Will this leap across the species barrier work? One of the early tests will of course be the way they deal with multi-cause complaints involving both service deliverers.

This month sees us off to the first conference of the National Centre for Involvement and we will be reporting back on that in a post next month.

Compact Challenge

By the way - on the topic of involvement and just in case you missed it, last week was 'Compact' week to celebrate the government compact or concordat which lays down the basis for its partnership with the third sector. In the way of these things, the only publicity we have seen on the topic during that week was the report of a court case where a local Age Concern was suing Cumbria County Council for not being 'compact-compliant' because the consultation lasted less than 12 weeks. We have talked in past posts and papers about the questionable value of focussing on a single target when assessing the effectiveness of a consultative procedure and the news that this was the central point in the Age Concern barrister's opening address makes us wonder about that even more. (The judge found in favour of the Council saying that adequate consultation had eventually taken place.).

Read more about M-A-C's complaint handling consulting, and download templates for reviewing and implementing better complaint handling at www.mooreadamsoncraig.co.uk