Whether you’re a customer with a complaint or a business handling a complaint, we aim to give you excellent customer service.

On this page

  1. What you can expect from us
  2. Our communication standards
  3. How we maintain the quality of our service
  4. Complaints about our service
  5. Conflicts of interest
  6. How we handle unreasonable behaviour
  7. Our quality-assurance principles

What you can expect from us

We’ll always try to:

Our communication standards

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:

  • An introduction from the case handler within five working days of them being allocated the case.
  • An update on your case at least once a month until the case is closed or progressed to decision, unless we agree differently with you or your representative.
  • An acknowledgement to voicemails and emails within two working days.
  • Should your case require an ombudsman's final decision, you can expect an update on your case from your case handler every two months.

The frequency of our communication with professional representatives, for example CMCs or solicitors, can be quite different, depending on the representative involved. As a result, these standards may not apply on cases where a professional representative is bringing the case on behalf of someone. Professional representatives are responsible for keeping their customers up to date on the progress of their case.

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 independent assessor submits an annual report about the complaints they 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 recognise that issues surrounding complaints can be stressful and upsetting – but our staff always deserve to be treated with courtesy and respect. We won’t tolerate violent, abusive or threatening behaviour towards our staff. If this happens, we may decide to take further action.  Find out more about what we consider as unreasonable behaviour and the actions we may take in our unreasonable behaviour policy.

Our quality-assurance principles

Our quality assurance principles

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