Agenda item

To receive the Annual report of Complaints and Compliments from the Head of Digital Transformation and Customer Engagement

The Committee had before it a *report from the Head of Digital Transformation and Customer Engagement.

The following was highlighted in the report:

·         The report covered two time periods. The Ombudsman’s report covered the period 2023-24.

·         There had been an overall increase of 5% in customer and residents’ feedback.

·         With the new Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) the Council were rolling out new surveys as each service was provided.

·         There had been a rise in complaints of 6% over the period which sounded a lot but in context of the thousands of individual services provided by the Council, anything under 10% increase in complaints, the Officer suggested, should not raise too much concern.

·         There was a significant decrease in the number of complaints received in certain service areas as mentioned in paragraph 3.5 of the report, services were doing better especially when it was borne in mind that in 2023/24 there were staff vacancies to enable the Council to balance its budget.

·         During 2023-24 two cases had been investigated by the Ombudsman, only one of which had been upheld and the Council had provided an apology which the Ombudsman had thought an appropriate response to that complaint.

·         Overall, there was no significant increase in complaints which would be reflective of a decrease in service.

·         The Council had recently moved to a new Code of Complaints and had instigated a new reporting system.

·         One of the Council’s targets, ‘initial acknowledgement within 5 days’, had not been met, some of which could be put down to an anomaly in the system and better staff training being required.  However, at the time of writing the report, the Council was meeting the response within time target 100% of the time.

·         The Head of Digital Transformation and Customer Engagement was now the senior officer responsible for complaints (excluding Housing) along with the Cabinet Member for Service Delivery and Continuous Improvement.

Discussion took place with regard to:

·         Manual checks were being made in the new system to check the reporting.

·         There would be additional qualitative analysis moving forward which would be started in the next quarter.

·         That the Scrutiny Committee should keep the Report of Complaints and Compliments coming to it as an annual report.

·         Whether Freedom of Information (FOI) data could come to the Scrutiny Committee quarterly perhaps by way of a dashboard, alternatively, whether a FOI report would be included within an Annual report to the Scrutiny Committee? This could be a separate report from the Customer Complaints report.

·         In order to be transparent the FOI data was published on the website quarterly. The Committee requested that they be provided with the data on a quarterly basis. Complaints and the nature of the complaints were changing. In proportion to the number of communications and services the Council offered, the proportion of complaints was very low.

·         With the change in customers visiting the Council offices and telephoning, now moving to on-line communications, how did that affect the way that the Council were responding? The Officer replied that nothing had changed in that each complaint was dealt with on its own merits.

·         Where a complaint was justified the officer would record whether there were any lessons to be learned or whether there were any process changes that needed to be implemented. That information was recorded on the CRM system and would influence the qualitative work that was to be done and evidence that change had been implemented.

·         If FOI data was already reported on the website and had its own dashboard, it should not be a burden for the Scrutiny Committee to see it once a quarter in arrears which would be more useful to the Committee. Key Performance Indicators that could be measured might include the response time.

The Head of Digital Transformation and Customer Engagement agreed to produce a briefing report for the December 2024 meeting of the Scrutiny Committee with some suggestions and proposals as to how to move forward with the reporting of FOI to the Scrutiny Committee.

The Committee agreed to NOTE the report and AGREED the following:

That the Annual report of Compliments, Comments and Complaints be allocated to the Service Delivery and Continuous Improvement Policy Development Group as well as  the Scrutiny Committee.

Note: (i) *report previously circulated

            (ii) Councillors D Broom, A Cuddy and M Farrell left the meeting after this item.