Our customer service

What you can expect from us

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

How we maintain the quality of our service

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

Our managers and ombudsmen check the day-to-day quality of our casework. They review our contact with customers and businesses to check that we: 

• listened and cared
• got to grips with the issues and used common sense
• were clear and honest

We use these checks to give feedback to our casework teams, and to measure how well we’re performing as a service. We also carry out quarterly reviews of our casework, identifying recurrent issues and trends so that we can learn and improve.

Complaints about our service

We know how important it is to learn from where things have gone wrong. And we want to do this for our service too, so that we can improve what we do in the future. That’s why we have our own procedure for looking at complaints about our customer service. 

If you complain to us about the service we’ve given you, we’ll first try to resolve the problem ourselves. But if we can’t, we have an independent assessor who’ll review the complaint impartially and recommend what we need to do to put things right.

Our current independent assessor is Ms Amerdeep Somal. She submits an annual report about the complaints she receives to our executive and board.

Find out how to complain about our customer service.

Conflicts of interest

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 any circumstances 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 immediately pass on the complaint to someone else. We set out our approach in more detail in our conflicts of interest policy.

How we handle unreasonable behaviour

We won't tolerate violent, abusive or threatening behaviour towards our staff, including:

• offensive language, including racist, sexist or homophobic language
• any form of discrimination
• aggressive or threatening behaviour, including the threat of physical violence

If we experience unreasonable behaviour, we may decide that we won’t:

• communicate with someone by phone or in person, only in writing
• communicate with someone directly, only through a representative
• continue looking at a complaint