The Shock of The New

Crucially, whilst it can be very hard to get people to engage early on with the theoretical idea of Something New, the actuality of the New Thing, once it appears, can trigger wild enthusiasm to engage.  It is usually relatively easy to identify what people dislike about the Existing Thing but harder to put your finger on exactly what they like about it.  And it is very hard indeed to discover what they might want in the New Thing if it does not yet exist.   So the appearance of something new provides the perfect trigger for engagement and dialogue.  Complaint and concerns become the engagement entry point but as we all know (don’t we) a complainant properly handled can be converted to a fan: complaints as opportunity, not threat.

I have been involved as the chair of my local park user group in a major project funded by the Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund to restore the park and the almost derelict 18th century house within it.  £9m and two years since the contractors arrived on site, the house and the cafe within it opened at the beginning of this month.  Inevitably the new cafe was inundated with people from the minute it opened (5000 customers in the first six days) and, just as inevitably, the cafe, the Council and the User Group have been inundated with complaints and comments.

It being 2012 these take a multitude of forms and are directed at anyone who cares to listen: lengthy emails to Council officers and the user group; witty, sensible and balanced blogs full of good ideas followed by bitter and angry riposts from both named and anonymous  commentators; tweeters tweeting and retweeting into infinity and the familiar range of constructive and snide comments on the pages of Facebook.  Amidst all the noise there has in fact been a lot of positive feedback too but somehow that’s not what you notice or what sticks in your mind when you down that second glass of wine after reading Bile Man’s tenth post of the day.

High volume feedback

It feels like there is a heck of a lot of noise going on, though if you read carefully and once your ear is attuned you start to realise that in many cases it is the same people having the same conversation in a multitude of different forums (and I suspect under a number of different “identities” aka silly names).    I am glad I have had twenty years in this game, otherwise I think I might have been a bit overwhelmed by the wave of anger and vitriol that has been washing over my computer screen in the last few days.

If I were doing this as a job, rather than as a volunteer and interested amateur, I’d find it hard to know where to begin in terms of being responsive. I might well wish for the good old days of having to respond only if a complaint was submitted in writing to the right department and followed the Complaints Policy to the letter, complete with a turn-around time of twenty working days.  As yet no-one from the Council seems to have joined any of these public debates (although I feel sure they are watching).  I can see why, but they do need to be tapping into this wealth of user feedback in some way and letting people know they are listening – not just by making changes but telling people that they are making these changes in response to their comments.  The good old Feedback Loop.

Bad old days but simple complaints

In the old days people complained that they could not get into the cafe because there was no step free access, the coffee was horrible, the food was unpleasant and unhealthy, the service poor, you had to queue for up to half an hour to get served when it was busy and you had to go outside to use the dirty smelly toilet block and there was nowhere to change a nappy.

So what has the Council done?  It has put in a lift so buggies and wheelchairs can have access to the whole house, it has brought in an experienced cafe provider which sells good coffee and healthy and attractive food, it has knocked down the disgusting toilet block and put the toilets in the house with fancy hand-dryers and a separate baby-changing room and it has introduced table service so people don’t have to queue whilst trying to control their children, leaving their friends to hang on to a table while they waited.

Are the good people  of the Stoke Newington twittersphere falling over themselves to demonstrate their appreciation of the Council’s responsiveness and their gratitude to the Heritage Lottery Fund?  Of course not. They have long since forgotten what was wrong with the old cafe that closed two years ago.  What matters is what’s wrong with what they see now.

Panning for gold

Maybe it is not the “Taking Away” or the “Giving Something New” that is the problem.  Maybe it is simply a matter of change.    It is a fact of life for anyone involved in delivering change in the public realm that some people won’t like it.  And it is another fact of life that you won’t get everything right first time: them damn punters just won’t use the building the way they are supposed to.  But our new cafe is not finished, the building has opened but what happens inside it is a work in progress and here we have a great opportunity to get a dialogue going with users.  We have existed for twenty year struggling to get more than twenty people into the room for our bi-monthly meetings to talk about all the boring stuff.  Suddenly everyone, everywhere seems to want to be heard and there is gold in them there users (once you can filter it out).   How we handle this is the next challenge facing User Group and the Council.

I can understand why the people who are working flat out to deliver new and better things to an apparently ungrateful public might be tempted to start seeing these people as a tiresome minority who will never be satisfied and metaphorically dump them in the files marked variously moaner, whinger, nutter, axe-grinder, single-issue-obsessive. And from personal experience this week I can assure you that it can be very difficult to respond positively in the face of the unfounded, misinformed personal attacks that often accompany the nastier blogs and tweets.  I get this stuff at some of our meetings too so it is nothing new.  Some are insulting – some plain baffling. (The man who turned down my offer to meet him in person to talk about his concerns suggested “knitted yogurt” may “float my boat”. Huh?)

Listening is a two way street

It is hard to stay in listening mode with people who seem determined to think the worst of everyone who is engaged in trying to make things better whether they be public servants, politicians or local volunteers and who insist on attributing the worst possible motives to your involvement: I obviously must be receiving back-handers from the Council; the cafe offering to provide free tea and coffee for the user group’s first meeting is a sign not of support for local involvement but of “ingratiation”; because I described the bread as “fresh” when the word is not actually used on the menu, I am thought to have some sort of insider knowledge which probably results from the fact that I hold shares in the cafe.  And not content with having a go at people like me who are sort of asking for it, they even have a go at other ordinary people who have the audacity to say they quite like the changes.  If this is what Big Society feels like I am not surprised it is not get many takers.

Instant gratification – instant turn-off

Every time your respond you simply breed yet more comments and sometimes you wish they would just shut up and leave you alone.   You want to turn off the computer but you know if you do they will still be at it, angrily bashing at their keyboards forming new alliances with other people with equally silly made-up names, finding new people to despise and practising their one-up-man-ship skills. Just waiting for you to come back as you surely will and must.  Worst of all are those websites where every single reply invites another reply, and that reply another reply and so on for ever and ever and suddenly you have not a single snake of comment and counter-comment but a multi-headed hydra with all the heads screaming at each other and at you.

You can’t even satisfy them by asking them to read info you have prepared earlier.  ”I’ve waited two days for a direct reply to Emma’s question….” said a post at 9.58am on Sunday haranguing me for not answering a question about the user group’s constitution posted at lunchtime on Friday even though I had immediately posted a link to the website where there is loads of detailed information about how we work.  The more you try to respond the more the process saps your time, your energy and your goodwill.  And like I say, I am just a volunteer. If I worked for the Council (WHICH I DON’T BTW) I’m not sure I’d be wanting your hard-earned Council tax to be spent paying me to do this.

We need an engagement answer that works

So what is the answer to this modern conundrum?  How do service providers and small unfunded voluntary community groups like the Clissold Park User Group engage constructively and cost-effectively with users in this new world where so many people are keen to share their view, opinion or bad experiences (plus the odd inaccurate or misleading “fact”  and a couple of unpleasant insinuations) not just with the service provider but with other users?  How can providers and user representatives  manage and make sense of a wealth of unfiltered, uncontrolled feedback?  How do you get the facts out to people amidst all the clamour?  How do you get the dialogue right when each individual can choose the time, place and medium through which they express themselves rather than following the rules of engagement set down by others.  How do we all make sense of a world where it feels as if, to quote Tim Minchin in the musical Matilda,  ”What you know matters less than the volume with which what you don’t know’s expressed”?

Is there a way to prevent people feeling that if they get a response they are just being fobbed off and and if they don’t, no-one cares or is listening? And how do we address the inherent imbalance and lack of openness in the fact that complainants can lurk behind masks of anonymity whilst make personal attacks on named individuals who are either doing their job as officers, acting as democratic representatives or volunteering their time.   In a small and demographically compact community, how do we encourage people  to show their faces and join the debate openly- should those who won’t  be given the same status in the conversation as those who do?  After all this is not a school or a GP’s practice we are talking about where there may be real issues of confidentiality or personal anxiety about power relationships: this is just a local park with a cafe in it.

Listening to the waving – and the drowning  - but not the shouting

And while we are talking about public engagement in services like health, education and social care, it’s worth thinking about how the challenges of modern public and user involvement affect these much more important and more sensitive areas. With all this racket going on, what can people in positions of responsibility and influence do to make sure they are hearing the people who are not shouting but quietly waving or maybe even drowning?

The Moore Adamson Craig Partnership supports user and public participation,  trains lay representatives and develops responsive  health, care and education organisations. We work with complaint handlers to achieve user satisfaction and recommendation.

“By sharing your views, you’ll be helping your child’s school to improve. You will also be able to see what other parents have said about your child’s school. Or, if you want to, view the results for any school in England”.

A dozen simple questions

You simply log in and give the name of your child’s school, confirm that your child attends that school and then answer 11 graded questions (strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree and don’t know).  The questions cover the same territory as the paper questionnaires that are distributed to parents in the week of an inspection asking for parents’ perceptions in a range of areas: how happy and safe your child seems and how well they are looked after; their progress; the amount of homework they are given; how bullying is handled by the school; how children in the school behave; how good the teaching is; how the school is managed and how well parental concerns are handled.  The twelfth and final question (and one we at MAC  always like to see in surveys) is whether or not you would recommend the school to other parents.  Just a simple yes or no on that one which is a pity since there are degress of readiness to recommend – it is not a black and white choice.

It would be interesting to have heard that debates which led to a special definition of “bullying” being added to the site when there is no definition of some of the other equally vague and subjective terms such “this school is well-led and managed” or “my child receives appropriate homework for their age”.  But there is  nothing wrong with a subjective responses on these sorts of questions as long as the feedback is used intelligently.

Dare to be free?

I did find myself wanting to tell them more and qualify some of my answers and it is slightly frustrating to have only the blunt instrument of the graded marking to respond to the questions.  How do I tell them that I think the teaching in History is exemplary whilst I know the teaching of French is most definitely not?  And how do I tell them that although they have responded to most of my concerns quickly and efficiently I am still feeling disgruntled by the fact that after years of complaints from many parents French is still being taught in exactly the same way?  A bit of free text somewhere on the form would not go amiss – but I suspect this may be where Ofsted conceded to the unions’ anxieties about those mad, bad parents saying nasty, dangerous things.  Remember Chris “Cassandra” Keates of the NASUWT?  She’s the one who said that a survey like this would be

“Open to abuse and manipulation and would therefore be an inappropriate and unreliable mechanism for triggering something as serious as inspection.”

Feedback, insight, foresight – keeping the Inspectors from the door

Well, you can be sure that if a  school is in the doldrums or heading that way, parents will soon pick it up and be only too keen to use the Ofsted website to have their voices heard. And bearing in mind that it was almost impossible to do this in the past unless you happened to live next door to the Secretary of State for Schools, this mechanism is surely to be welcomed.  If giving parents a voice means triggering questions and even an inspection, then so be it.  Isn’t that the point of the whole thing? Any sensible school will be encouraging parents to fill it in and update their views regularly and will be incorporating this feedback from parents into its normal feedback and insight processes long before the sort of problems arise that would trigger a call from the Inspectors.

The pros and cons of anonymity

The site makes it clear that all feedback is anonymous so there is no way for schools to know who it is that is commenting.   Overall I can see the benefits of this from the point of view of a parent but past experience makes me worry that schools may use this as a way of dismissing views they do not like: the “Yeah, well, we know who THAT is”  or “Oh it’s just an organised campaign” responses that we all too often hear  (subtext: Dismiss, as you were).   But as a governor I can see that there might be times when it would be useful to be able to analyse the data in some ways: do the parents of children in reception have a stronger sense that their child is being looked after than those with children in Year 6?  Still, there is plenty of time and room for developing this sort of sophistication.

So congratulations to Ofsted for what we will assume to be phase one of their new website.  And an extra bonus mark for sticking to its guns on its plan to use information from parents to trigger inspections despite the knee-jerk resistance of the unions.  Let’s watch this space to find out how appropriate and reliable this mechanism proves to be.

The Moore Adamson Craig Partnership supports user and public participation,  trains lay representatives and develops responsive public service organisations.  Feel free to contact us to discuss the opportunities.

“We…. intend to take greater account of parents’ views in helping us to decide when a school should be inspected. We are currently considering new ways in which parents’ views about a school will be gathered regularly and not just at the time when it is inspected. We propose to gather parents’ views by inviting them to answer a range of questions about their children’s school via Ofsted’s website. These findings will be considered as part of the risk awareness process.”

Hold on a minute – did they say listening to the views of parents would become “part of the risk awareness process”.   Time to sit up and listen.  Here is a government body appearing to embrace the idea that the users of a public service might have something really important to tell them about that service.  This is not about going through the motions of listening for the sake of it but because they recognise that there is a real risk in failing to do so.  And they want to do it “regularly”!  Better and better.

Parent Opinion Website

Although we think the use of structured questions to parents proposed in the consultation document will be useful for inspectors in deciding whether to carry out an inspection, it would make sense to complement this with an independent “Parent Opinion” website along the lines of the well-established Patient Opinion website which invites individual stories both good and bad and allows health organisations to respond and to tell people what they have done as a result of the feedback.  They sign up healthcare providers to subscribe to the service and take the information on board as part of their patient-centred quality processes as well as providing a response to the individual.

James Munro of Patient Opinion describes it appeal:

“At Patient Opinion we’ve learned a lot about how people want to give their feedback to health services, and what they expect to see. First, while many people may want to give critical feedback, they don’t necessarily want to “make a complaint”.  This seems to be a distinction the health service struggles to grasp.  Second, people want to know that they can be honest, without fear of being identified. They want to say both what was good, and what could be better. We’ve learnt that this honesty, and the mix of feedback that results, is important to both patients and staff.  Third, people want to know that their feedback was heard – and by whom. And finally, they want to see that giving feedback can, at least sometimes, make a difference”.

It is easy to see how this could work for parents and schools.

Making OFSTED aware

When my daughters’ school started to fail in a huge number of different ways, it was the parents, particularly those who had been around for a while, who saw what was happening.  We set up a Parent Forum to try to channel parents’ concerns into the management of the school.  Parent governors struggled to make themselves heard at governors meetings by senior management and the local authority but to no avail. Eventually one parent sneaked off to phone Ofsted to ask them when they were next due in the school.  She was told that because the last inspection which had taken place several years earlier had shown that all was well, they were not planning to come back for another three years.  Thanks to her courage and persistence the inspectors turned up a few months later and set the ball rolling for major change.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply have gone on-line and given voice to our anxieties knowing that someone somewhere was listening?  Well, we parents might think so but the teaching unions feel otherwise.

Teacher resistance – same old, same old

In response to the consultation Christine Blower of the NUT has said;

“The ability for parents to complain directly to Ofsted is already in place and has been very rarely used, which shows that parents are generally very supportive of their children’s schools”.

Two classics here:  first, the implication that because no-one can find their way their way through a labyrinthine and intimidating process it means that everyone is happy (rather than reflecting how hard it is to complain) and secondly, the assumption that parents who complain are not “supportive” of their children’s schools – when in fact the complete opposite can often be the case.

She goes on:

“Parents will not want to be involved in triggering early inspections. To offer such an opportunity is unnecessary. What is important for parents is that they have a voice in schools and that their views are taken seriously. It’s not clear therefore why parents, who may have quite legitimate questions to which they seek answers, would choose this route.”

I wonder how Ms Blower knows what parents feel about triggering early inspections.  I am not aware that the NUT spends much time talking to parents.  Of course no-one wants their school publicly damned by inspectors but that does not mean they don’t sometimes welcome an inspection.  It may not seem a “necessary opportunity” in the teachers’ eyes but in the absence of any other form of influence, it may feel very necessary to parents.

Cut back on the parent voice

It would be great to think that there are good and effective routes within all schools for raising concerns and sharing them with others but the simple fact is that that although there are many examples of excellent practice, it is certainly not universal.  Hardly any schools have parent councils; new Trust schools, Academies and Free schools can get away with even fewer parents on governing bodies that maintained schools and complaints policies, as we have discussed before on this blog, are both bureaucratic and feeble.  An open and easily accessible on-line forum could provide schools with an effective means of hearing what parents have to say-  removing many of the practical, social and emotional barriers that stop so many parents challenging their school or even just making their voices heard: the meetings at children’s bedtimes, the other parents who speaker louder and longer, the childhood memories of being intimidated by teachers.

No hiding place

And then of course there is the usual reaction of public service professionals to the idea of allowing service users to express their views on the service in a public forum, a reaction we have seen before in health.  Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT union, said:

“To hold schools to account on the basis of chat room and internet gossip trivialises public accountability and the work of schools.  Such a system would be open to abuse and manipulation and would therefore be an inappropriate and unreliable mechanism for triggering something as serious as inspection.”

No-one is suggesting that the on-line collection of data about pupil and parent views and experiences would be the sole way in which a judgement would be made about a school.  But as one of a range of ways of testing the quality and impact of what you are doing, its value cannot be denied.   It is insulting to parents  to think that they are not capable of putting forward rational and balanced perspectives.  Of course there will be some nastiness, some nutters, some fruity language but isn’t it about time professionals stopped being so squeamish about this sort of thing?  Ignoring cross people only makes them crosser and the internet and social networking are out there whether the teachers and doctors like it or not.  And while we are at it, why not have a similar website for the students?

Websites like Patient Opinion have demonstrated that the vast majority of people are careful about what they write and most of the organisations that engage with people through the website find the experience and the data they gather useful.  In fact the schools might be surprised to find, as Patient Opinion does, that they receive a significant amount of positive and useful feedback.  Some schools might even welcome it as a way of keep their finger on the pulse of their parents’ opinions.

The Moore Adamson Craig Partnership supports user and public participation,  trains lay representatives and develops responsive  health, care and education organisations.

Nothing spoils a holiday quite as much as a stressful and unpleasant journey.  This year we decided to take the family to South West France for a couple of weeks.  Big mistake.  Getting there and back was so bad it took us a couple of weeks to remember that we had actually had quite a nice time in the middle.  I knew I should complain (my MAC partners were breathing down my neck) but I could hardly bring myself to relive the whole ghastly experience.  Still, I am glad I did.  Whereas I have spent the last month telling anyone who would listen how bad our experience was, I have now become one of Eurostar’s biggest fans.  What do we at MAC always say?  Good complaint handling can turn the grumpiest complainant into the your biggest fan and here I am, unexpectedly singing the praises of Eurostar.

No Relief for Family of Refugees from Ryanair

After a series of nightmarish experiences with Ryanair we decided to go by train this year.  What could be better?  Comfortable, calm check-in just down the road at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International, two hours to hop across Paris on the Metro and maybe have a bite to eat and swishing down to the south of France on a highspeed train – tickets and seats all booked through Rail Europe100 days in advance as recommended by our friend the man in seat 61.  And all with only the tiniest contribution to my global footprint.  Or at least that is how it should have been.

Un Complète Cockup

Turning up at St Pancras an hour before departure, we discovered that the 6.25am we were booked onto did not exist and that the first train was leaving 25 minutes later.  I went to collect the tickets from the machine but without success.  In the ticket office the charming staff entered my booking reference and found our booking but soon discovered that the computer would not “release” the tickets.  We would have to wait five minutes.  While everyone else effortlessly collected their tickets I stood waiting, and waiting and waiting.  Check-in opened.  Check-in closed.  An hour after our arrival at the station my anxious mob of six, ranging in age from one to forty four were getting fretful.  The minutes ticked by and with check-in officially closed and the train leaving in fifteen minutes I tried to get someone to talk to me.  They kept telling me it would be ok and that they would give us duplicate tickets if necessary.  To cut a long and stressful story short, we were finally issued with a handwritten duplicate ticket less than ten minutes before departure and had to run through check-in and security only just reaching the train in time.  At Paris, the change of train time having reduced our time to cross Paris by half an hour, I had to spend another twenty minutes waiting for them to laboriously print out the pack of cards that represented return tickets to Agen for seven people and for the nice French lady in the severe suit to find her post-it pad and write an immaculately transcribed note to the train guard in case we missed our connection.  This left us with about forty minutes to cross Paris.  Never had an underground system so many stairs (and so few escalators).   We made it – but only just.

Our return journey ought to have been less stressful but it wasn’t.  Our beautiful SNCF train – the symbol of how much better they do it in France – was held up for two hours owing to what the English call a “person on the line” but which the French appear to refer to more discreetly as “un incident”.  As it gradually became apparent that we were not going to catch the last train from Paris to London I rang Eurostar only to be told that as our tickets were non-refundable and non-exchangeable they would not be honoured on a later train and we would have to buy new tickets at £200 a go.  With our now expanded party of 9, that would have meant a cool £1800 on the credit card.  I decided to wait.  When I rang again an hour later I was told that our tickets would after all be honoured on the next available train.

Is this a record?

But here is the real point of my tale.  A couple of weeks after my return I plucked up the energy to email my complaint to Eurostar asking for an explanation, an apology and some compensation.  Within six hours I had received a full reply, a reply which for those familiar with the MAC mantra on complaint handling could almost be seen as a model of how to do it.  Here are some edited highlights:

Apologies, empathy and explanation

I am sorry to learn of the difficulties that you all experienced in collecting you tickets and the advice you appear to have been given by telephone. I can fully understand the stress and inconvenience, as well as the disappointment that this caused you all. Having to rush through stations and on the underground is far from ideal and I realise that this was far from your expectations.

Having explained in detail what he found when he investigated the complaint and how the booking had somehow become corrupted, the writer goes on to say:

This is an extremely rare error to encounter, and has not been experienced by anyone at the ticket office or the helpdesk that I have spoken to. Therefore, this is being treated very seriously and will be investigated fully in order to determine the cause of the problem. I cannot say when this will be concluded but I can assure you that it will ensure this issue does not arise again in the future.

Further apology and offer of compensation

In light of the ticketing problems, I would like to offer you a gesture (of) my concern for your experience and of goodwill, which I hope will assure you of our intentions. Therefore, please accept my personal apologies and if you can supply your address, I would like to send you each a Eurostar journey voucher, which will entitle you each to a free single leg journey or a 50% discount on a return trip. They are fully transferable and valid for one year.

Happy customer – returning customer

So here I am with a prompt, detailed and polite response to my email, a sense that others will probably not have to suffer as we did, a recognition of our emotions and their validity and a very decent level of compensation.  I copied my email to Rail Europe through whom we booked the tickets and they too have now admitted that they had made an errror somewhere along the way which had helped to confuse the Eurostar computer and they have offered me an additional £50 voucher.  For a moment I had toyed with returning to Ryanair, but given they don’t even have a complaints department, I will be sticking with Eurostar (at least for as long as it takes us to use up all those vouchers).

All aboard?

Now, if Eurostar can do it why can’t the public sector?  Why do the NHS, schools, local authorities and all those other public bodies find it so hard to empathise with their customers and handle their complaints properly so that complainants get what they want: to know they have been listened too, to know that someone cares about their bad experience, to know that something will be done and to know that maybe, as a result, the same bad things won’t happen to them again or to others?

Coming soon – what happens when you complain about your butter? Meanwhile, take a look at the MAC credo on complaint handling and how we can help on our website

]]> http://www.publicinvolvement.org.uk/2009/09/thats-the-way-to-do-it-eurostar-shows-us-the-way/feed/ 3 http://www.publicinvolvement.org.uk/2008/07/welcome-to-the-new-look-public-involvement-blog/ http://www.publicinvolvement.org.uk/2008/07/welcome-to-the-new-look-public-involvement-blog/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:51:58 +0000 Colin Adamson http://www.publicinvolvement.org.uk/?p=18 A round up of recent posts on www.publicinvolvement.org.uk, plus our very quick survey for parents of school-age children.]]> Our passions remains the same but we have clothed our mix of news and views in new clothes knitted together with WordPress which Dan Wardle of Surveylab our adviser in these matters assures us will bring the blog into the world of Web 2.0.

On www.publicinvolvement.org.uk recently…

A MP has asked why we are all so miserable? Are we becoming a nation of miserabilists never happier than when whingeing? We take a look at the latest Annual Report from the Financial Services Ombudsman for some facts and figures on the nation’s complaint behaviour in the markets he covers. The principle of being fair to consumers is all the rage in regulatory circles and we look at the new laws banning unfair practices backed by new OFT research that tells us that ‘consumer detriment’ costs us as consumers over £6billion pounds a year. We join up our learning on complaints with our thinking on user engagement and ask – are they linked?. Can the complainant become the engaged user for the longer term?

Finally just to keep give you a chance to tell us your experience, there is a mini-survey for parents of school age children to complete about what they did when they had a problem with the children’s school.

Have a good summer.

The Ombuds View
What does the Financial Ombudsman say about all this in his latest latest Annual Report? There were two areas where numbers of complaints rose very sharply – complaints about current accounts which saw a five-fold increase and those about payment protection insurance up from 1832 in the year ending March 2007 to 10,652 by March 2008. These are both interesting example of how complaint volumes can now be driven by media and internet campaigners – chief amongst them Martin Lewis whose site moneysavingexpert.com leads on these two areas of consumer problems suggesting templates for letters and other encouragements to complain against these practices.

Hire your own complaint handler?
Another phenomenon identified by the FOS is the rise in the commercial complaint handler. In almost one in five cases referred to the Ombudsman service, consumers used the services of such a company. This is strange – after all the service is free to use. However it may be because the consumer believes that the product is too complex to understand let alone complain about – the Ombudsman specifically mentions pension and SERP-related cases where the complaint handler makes unrealistic promises about the money that they can get for the consumer with a problem.

The New Community Agenda
The FOS has set up an Access working party. The Board had asked Lord Hunt of Wirral to look at access and transparency issues in particular and now the service is looking at implementation. Walter Merricks is now looking at what he calls a more active community agenda – awareness-raising with outreach programmes. He is already claiming some success with more under 35s and more women complaining diluting the historic profile of the Ombuds-user as the retired male with a duff pension, time on his hands and a new skill in word processing.

The Heavy Mob
As Walter gets interested in the ‘soft’ skills of awareness raising etc, the OFT and BERR are looking at the role of the enforcers and how that sits with the new emphasis on principle-based law. 23 laws have been repealed and now as of end May this year we have The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations which implement the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. 31 specific trading practices – my favourite is the one that bans the ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing. See all 31 practices here (links to PDF file at OFT).

As part of this new approach, principled but pragmatic, the Office of Fair Trading and the Department for Business, Entreprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) are looking to use the improved complaint data that they are getting from sources such as Consumer Direct to direct the searchlight towards those areas of the greatest consumer detriment. The OFT has recently published some more work in this area in April 2008. The amount of consumer detriment was estimated at £6.6 billion.

Remember “Jewels to be Treasured”?
So the miserable complainer is getting taken very seriously indeed. Long ago in another political area/ universe, the then Secretary of State for Health Virginia Bottomley characterised complaints – and by extension we suppose those who make them – as “jewels to be treasured”. A leap across time to the present brings us back to the health service and our current pre-occupation with health and social care services user involvement and engagement.

Complaining and Engaging
After all the complainant is someone who has made the choice to become engaged to pursue an individual goal – apology, correction, compensation. That initial individual impetus to action can cross-over into the more sustained and collective experience of engagement. We have noticed that many of those who come forward for patient forums and liaison groups have had an experience of health provision which has made a deep impression on them. The experience of complaining can act as the recruiting sergeant for patient engagement – the challenge of that is a double one. We have to understand how to convert what is often a negative into a positive directed towards improvement for all rather than vengeance on the few associated with the initial failure and we must make the experience of joining a patient body such as the LINks one that sustains commitment over the longer term.

Dare to Discuss Being Happy
My thought is that we have to turn to the work highlighted at the recent summer party held by the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute. Yes of course it rained but the topic was a daring one – Happiness. The research shows that happiness once a reasonable level of material comfort has been reached comes from elements in our lives associated like getting married, being a member of a faith group and attending services regularly, using some extra leisure to spend time with family and friends and staying healthy. This last attribute will help you get beyond the trough of the middle years – the slough of despond linked in particular with having teenagers sharing the family home. Once they have gone, the happiness line slants upward only interrupted by the death of a spouse.

Can we add to the list – membership of a LINk?
Or perhaps participating in a quick survey?

I took a look at what Lord Hunt (LH) identified as “the most contentious and difficult issue for this Review“. It got a chapter of its own called “Transparency – Performance Data”. The consumer bodies wanted lots of information with poorly performing companies ‘named and shamed’. The companies resisted it for various fairly predictable reasons – one of which was that “consumers would not understand the information and might be misled by it.” So easily confused they are – poor things. So consumer orgs for and companies against. LH said he was disappointed by this polarised response but he could hardly have been surprised.

In the event he went on to conclude that information on complaint performance is relevant and that there was “no legitimate justification for withholding it as a matter of principle.” The FOS already publishes an anonymised benchmarking table showing the top 11 financial groups. What is surprising is not that the worse performing companies want to keep their performance under wraps but that, according to Walter Merricks, the chief Ombudsman, “the best firm (does not) seem to want to promote its performance positively“.

Hunt suggests a mix of carrot – an Award for exceptional improvement in complaint handling – and stick – the Worst Performer identified in each of the markets the FOS covers by reference to the rate of upheld complaints. Much remains to be decided and the negotiations will go on for a while I would guess. Hunt concludes by saying he finds “openness both desirable and inevitable“. Amen to that.

All this manoeuvring brings to mind how the public sector has addressed the challenge of openness. Public sector performance in this area is a model of openness. If you look at the reports of the Healthcare Commission and the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, you will find the parties listed and named.

Case No. E.1947/02- 03 Discharge Procedures
Poor transfer arrangements and nursing care
Complaint against BUPA Care Homes and Bexley Bromley and South East London Strategic Health authority, formerly Greenwich Health Authority
Summary of Case
etc. – this is from an old Ombudsman Case – we will await the revised format of cases promised for any day now.

The Healthcare Commission also names the organisations involved in the complaints it deals with – a job it is giving up in April 2009. Escalated complaints go straight to the Ombudsman after that.

So perhaps in preparation, Anne Abraham’s office is doing a consultation on principles of complaint handling – get your comments in by 12th August even if they are covered with sand stuck on with Factor 50. Great reading for the beach.

Read more about how M-A-C approaches complaint handling and our account of complaint handling at a London hospital.

The Public Administration Select Committee are in the news for advocating a single entry point for public services complaints.

Para 42. “We agree with Sir David Varney and the National Audit Office that the Government should explore the scope for a common access point nationwide for all non-emergency public services. This would provide a single point of contact for impartial information on where to make a complaint or seek redress. We restate our predecessor Committee’s recommendation in favour of just such a service-’Public Services Direct’-which would offer an easy access, one-stop-shop approach to a complex web of public services. Public Services Direct should be both a gateway to government organisations and services, and a source of basic advice to public service users. It would act as the starting point for people unsure of how or where to lodge their initial complaint, and would provide them with the appropriate information and guidance.” When Citizens Complain, Fifth Report

In the terms we use about complaint handling, the above is a referral site. What the public want is a problem-resolution site. Most people build complaint handling processes offering an initial point of contact and then a second one if the problem does not get sorted there. Where the complainant wants to see Houses of Correction, the public service build great Palaces of Escalation. For resolution, read referral.

The committee quotes this example:

“…for agencies of the Department for Work and Pensions complaints are dealt with initially by staff at local level. Complainants can then escalate a complaint to line management as necessary. If they are still unsatisfied they can raise the case directly with the Business Chief Executive, and then appeal to the Independent Case Examiner.57 Finally, the Ombudsman can consider the case if it is referred to her by a Member of Parliament.”

The big growth in the public services is in the intermediate complaint handling organisations:

“There are also an increasing number of independent, or quasi-independent, complaint review bodies to which complainants can turn before raising matters with the Ombudsman. These intermediate or second-tier complaint handlers exist particularly where the Ombudsman receives a large number of complaints about an organisation. They include:

• The Adjudicator’s Office, which investigates complaints about HMRC, the Valuation Office Agency, the Public Guardianship Office and the Insolvency Service.
• The Healthcare Commission, which at present is responsible for reviewing complaints about the National Health Service (NHS) or independent healthcare services that have not been resolved at local level. From April 2009, however, the Healthcare Commission will no longer have a role in complaints handling, as complaints processes for health and social care will be brought together and the system streamlined to emphasise local resolution of complaints.
• The Independent Case Examiner, who reviews complaints about DWP bodies including the Child Support Agency, the Pension Service and Jobcentre Plus.
• The Independent Complaints Reviewer, who investigates complaints about a range of organisations including the Audit Commission, the Charity Commission, the Housing Corporation, the National Archives and the Land Registry.”

These organisations are sort of junior organisationally specific Ombudsoffices but without the clout or the power of being the last stop.

The committee’s suggestion for a one stop shop will merely add another layer to an already complex and expensive system that institutionalises delay, decreases satisfaction and increases escalation. Hooray for the Health Service that has abolished the middle layer.

Also people at entry points for complex multi-organisational or multi-cause complaints systems while often recruited from the ranks of the beginners, the juniors and the newly-joined have to be the best qualified people in the whole system. They must have extraordinary gifts of diagnosis, have access to completely up-to-date knowledge about who does what together with telephone numbers for named individuals and be possessed of extra-ordinary personal attributes of empathy, listening skills and clarity of expression.

Do you think ‘Public Service Direct’ could deliver that? How many years would pass as everyone from departments sat round tables evolving protocols, manuals, interrogative algorithms, contact detail updating processes? There would of course be a need for an independent complaint handler for complaints about Public Service Direct. Decades would drift by. NHS Direct anyone?

What surprised me finally was not to see NACAB’s name listed amongst those supplying evidence. They are at last trying to grapple with the complexities of how best to concentrate and manage resources to advise people on the whole range of public services and products. Give them £10 or £20 Million for 7 years and tell them to set up the front door – they seem to be well down that path already. See http://www.nacab.org.uk/ and their change programme:

Year one (2005/06)
In the first year, we had a good look at what we were already doing, produced an award-winning film showing what we might look like in the future and completed a number of key initiatives:

• designing a new approach to service delivery
• piloting an out of hours, telephone, email and chat service
• setting up three centres to pilot the new approach to service delivery
• developing a set of national referral protocols
• commissioning the production of a new advice kiosk

Year two (2006/07)
Having successfully completed year one we are now moving forward by:

• establishing a single national telephone advice number
• setting up a national email advice service
• improving access to web based information and services
• introducing the new approach to service delivery
• considering how interactive (chat room style) advice can best be used
• forging productive partnerships with other agencies and advice providers

And it goes on.

It is not a question of avoiding re-inventing the wheel – more a question of not adding yet another redundant wheel when we already have all the wheels we need to propel this particular vehicle thank you.

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