Our customer service

We’ll always try to:

• investigate fairly and listen to both sides
• give you our answer as quickly as possible
• explain things clearly and let you know where you stand
• meet your communication and accessibility needs.

We have standards that we put in place to provide assurance and accountability for the service we provide.

The time it takes to resolve a complaint depends on the complexity of the issue and the current demand for our service. You can find out more about our timescales on the ‘how long it takes’ page.

Once your case has been allocated to a case handler for investigation, you can expect:

• your case handler to introduce themselves within five working days
• an update on your case at least once a month until the case is closed or progressed to decision, unless we agree something different with you or your representative
• your voicemails and emails to be acknowledged within two working days
• an update on your case from your case handler every two months, if your case requires an ombudsman's final decision.

How often we communicate with professional representatives – for example claims management companies (CMCs) or solicitors – may be different, depending on the representative involved. So, these standards may not apply to cases that a professional representative is bringing on behalf of someone.

Professional representatives are responsible for keeping their customers up to date on the progress of their case.

Information for professional representatives

A conflict of interest is when someone’s judgement or actions at work are, or could be, affected by something unconnected with their role.

It’s our job to be independent and impartial, so we take active steps to make sure that conflicts of interest don’t arise. 

We expect all our staff to tell us as soon as they become aware of anything that could give rise, or be seen to give rise, to a conflict of interest.

If a member of staff is handling a complaint where there’s a potential conflict of interest, we’ll pass on the complaint to someone else immediately. We set out our approach in more detail in our conflicts of interest policy.

Our conflicts of interest policy

We aim to maintain a high level of quality in how we handle complaints. Our case handlers work closely with our ombudsmen, who support them with specialist knowledge and their experience of finding fair answers to complaints. And our ombudsmen work together in professional practice groups to make sure we’re consistent in our thinking and approach.

Our Quality Strategy and Framework (PDF 816KB) focuses on measuring our performance against key customer, quality and service expectations at each stage of a case journey:

• case set up
• investigation, and
• final decision.

Each month, we check a sample of cases against our organisational standards. Our dedicated Quality team analyses the results of these checks to:

• give feedback to our casework teams, and
• identify areas of best practice and opportunities for improvement.

These insights are then shared across all levels of the organisation through our governance structure.

We strive to deliver a good service to all our customers. But, if things go wrong, you can bring your concerns to us. 

If you want to complain about the service we’ve given you, first speak to the person who has been dealing with your case. Most of the time, they'll be able to sort things out for you straight away.

If we can’t resolve things informally, you can make a customer service complaint.

If we can’t sort things out through our internal complaints procedure, you can complain to our Independent Assessor. She’ll review the complaint impartially and recommend what we need to do to put things right.

Our independent assessor submits an annual report about the complaints they receive to our Executive team and Board.