Our customer service and accessibility

Our cross-organisational Service Experience Team (SET) continues to drive innovation in customer service. Drawing on the team’s own experience and input from the Consumer Panel and others, they develop and test improvements in our processes and provide a source of support and challenge to the wider organisation in improving our customer service.

This year the Service Experience Team embedded our new approach to collecting and analysing customer feedback from a variety of sources. This new system ensures we can identify trends or emerging issues where we can take action to improve our customer service.

This year SET also introduced a pilot scheme called PAL – Process Assistance Line. It addresses the fact that many smaller firms will not be familiar with our process when they get a complaint and offers specific support for them to understand and engage with our complaints process.

SET also identified a key issue around solicitors withdrawing from acting when a complaint is made and developed communications for both solicitors and consumers considering making a complaint about this issue. We promoted key messages from this through our social media channels.   

Following last year’s refresh of the ‘for consumers’ section of our website, we developed videos to accompany the pages and shared key messages on our social media channels.

We held an all staff meeting on accessibility, reminding staff of some key accessibility concerns for our users and how we can make our services as accessible as possible for everyone. We shared the improvements we have made in recent years and discussed areas where further work is required.

Drawing on a dip sample of our cases where reasonable adjustments were requested, we looked at the adjustments we can make and reminded staff where to find information and help if a request is made or an adjustment is required.

We commissioned a report reviewing research on equalities to build a better understanding of what contemporary Scotland looks like. The work will inform our strategy and operational planning in the coming years, as well as work to implement legislative reform.

We also ensured new templates developed as part of recent changes to our process were tested for accessibility.

We ask everyone who makes or is the subject of a complaint what they thought of our service. We ask for feedback while the complaint is in process and once it has closed so we can make improvements along the way. We ask about the quality of the information we provided to them, how well we explained things, the time we took to deal with the complaint, if we dealt with it fairly and impartially and how helpful we were. We also provide an opportunity for free text comments. In addition, service users can provide feedback at any time on our website and on our Trustpilot page, which we monitor and respond to.