An update on developing a positive complaints culture

We are committed to delivering the best service we can to our customers, this includes if you ever need to make a complaint.

We are on a journey to develop a positive complaints culture, which we’ve previously shared updates about.

But what do we mean by a positive complaints culture?

We are constantly reviewing our complaints handling process right from how you can contact us to log a complaint, through the process to the final outcome. It’s about ensuring you know how to get in touch if you need to, and you then receiving the best customer service while we work through your issue or complaint.

This not only involves changes to processes that you can see, but also training with colleagues and encouraging conversations and learnings to help us make improvements.

At the heart of all of this is real-time feedback from our customers. We have been sending short customer surveys to ask customers, who have been through our complaints process and had a final outcome, about their experience.

There are some clear learning themes starting to come through. Early contact and quicker outcomes have had a really positive impact on the complaints experience. Customers tell us that regular updates are valuable and give confidence that their concerns are being investigated.  We have made changes within customer services to support the operational management of complaints and will continue to review our services against the feedback we receive to improve further.

In some cases, customers have also shared their thanks to their complaints officer and case manager.

Some recent feedback includes “I am so very grateful for the work that you have carried out to bring this complaint so promptly, at stage 1, to an agreed conclusion.” Mr C, London.

We are starting to see a difference – In June, this year it took an average of 18 working days to respond to a Stage 1 complaint. By October, that had reduced to 15 working days, even though we had an expected seasonal increase in complaints of 40% in October compared to June. This is a testimony to the hard work that everyone has made towards the complaints process right across Aster.

The next step is for us to get better at applying learning, in order to continue to improve the service we offer you and reduce the number of complaints that are made in the future.