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bjbj (Intro Chime) So, there's a problem really in the telecommunications industry about complaint
handling and about customer service. So, how would we design a better complaint handling
system? Well, I'm going to talk really in terms of some high level principles. Principles
are ones that I developed in work with a league, Belinda Leonard a couple of years ago. I don't
think that they're particularly controversial. They're based partly on ISO standards for
complaint handling and they should seem fairly familiar to everybody here. Although the actual
wording might be slightly different. The important thing, however, is how do you put the principles
into practice? What they actually mean? A very important way, to make them effective,
to get good complaints handling system, you have to work through the detail and the affects
of rules and such like, as we'll see. I'll start with internal systems, because I think
this is probably where the real issue lies. Because you need the companies to get their
complaint handling up to scratch. Giving the external systems like the TIO, are really,
in some sense, just the recipients of bad complaint handling by the company or complaint
handling, which doesn't meet customer satisfaction. I've identified five principles here, as you'll
see. Accessibility, effectiveness, fairness and consistency, responsiveness, organisational
ownership and commitment. I'll just say a brief bit about each of them. In terms of
accessibility, easy for us all to say that what we want is it's easy for the consumers
to get access to. There's clear information about what's going to happen, and, of course,
that is free. In practice, things can be a bit more difficult. I did the thing I normally
do whenever I think about accessibility - I went and looked at a couple of websites
before I did this presentation. I didn't spend very much time on this. It's not scientific,
but obviously I picked on Telstra's website, and right on the front of it says, "Here's
a link you can click on to make a complaint." And underneath it, it has a probably less-used
website, and says, "Here you can give us a compliment." OK, but Telstra, you just click
on that and it has a simple form and you make a complaint. I then tried Optus and I spent
five or ten minutes on the Optus site and I couldn't find the link to make a complaint.
Now, I'm sure that somebody can explain to me what I missed. But if I can't find a link
on how to make a complaint, and I've been doing this for some years, then there's going
to be a lot of people who are going to miss that. And that leads to the more general point
that the more problems you put in the complaint handling system, the more stages, you're going
to get people dropping out. That's one other thing we have, which is, if it is difficult
to complain, people stop at various points. And so you need a system which is easy to
get access to not putting barriers said. And as Chris said earlier, talking about mobiles,
which in theory are free, but actually in practice aren't. So there are a number of
issues there. The other thing - and you can move from there to effectiveness. Because
you want an internal system which is effective, where the staff have the ability to respond
to the complaint where the organisation might actually learn from the complaints, and again,
there's some question about how effective these systems are. It was interesting looking
at ACCAN's survey of its members which it has just published, which is in your pack,
when they asked members about what they did about complaints, just under a third of them
said, well, actually, we didn't do anything about this complaint. And again, I think that
that is significant, that you do a survey of consumer activists with complaints about
telecoms companies and a third of them say - just couldn't be bothered to do anything
about it. It suggests that there may be quite a lot of people who are not bothering to do
things. Again, fairness and responsiveness. You want a system that's objective and you
want a system where the staff actually listen to your complaint and hear it and it's clearly
an issue with call centres where staff come up with, essentially, pre-programmed responses
to people's complaints and don't sound as if they've actually listened to what's been
said. It's very important to have an internal system that's responsive, that certainly doesn't
move the customer around. Because the more you move the customer around, you say, "Look,
I can't deal with this, talk to this person." The more likely people are to give up, because
there comes a point where people say, OK, I've talked to two people and I haven't got
an answer. Maybe I'm just going to have to lump it. Customers, of course, want a response
in a timely manner. And this is something that has been a particular problem in the
United Kingdom where the Office of Communications reckons that each year, there's something
like three million complaints to telecoms companies which have not been resolved within
three months. And three months is significant, because that's the sort agreed time limit
redress for the schemes. They've got three months to resolve them. And Ofcom reckons
there's three million a year that aren't resolved within that time. Which actually suggests
that there's quite a big problem here. And a final point about internal schemes is the
importance of organisational ownership and commitment. This is something that was said
to me a couple of years ago by the chair of the local ombudsman. He said to me, "What
you really need to get a good, effective, internal scheme is for the leadership of the
organisation to buy into this and to be committed to it." That does actually need more than
the chief executive signing up to the high level principles. Needs to become an integral
part of the organisation. Because it's quite easy to sign up to the principles, which most
people agree with. And to do this in quite good faith, but there is a problem with big
organisations where those who are leading say, - well, these are the principles that
we're going to hold you to and to agree with, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it
goes down to the frontline staff. You've got to work quite hard to integrate complaints
handling as part of what you do. For example, have a system where you get complaints reports
that go, for example, to the board of directors on a regular basis to see what's happening.
And just to go back to this point, it's actually an opportunity for companies, not only to
solve problems within the organisation, but to find new opportunities. gdjK [Content_Types].xml
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