Making a Difference: Changing the culture around complaints
Complaints aren’t just people complaining. They’re opportunities for us to learn, improve and understand our customers better.
Complaints are one of the most important ways we hear what’s not working and gain insight to make things better. If we don’t understand how to listen, and if you’re not empowered to talk to us when things go wrong, then things don’t get better.
Over the past few years, we’ve been making changes to our complaints process, taking big steps towards a more open and accountable system.
Putting ourselves in your shoes
To build accountability and empathy, we want to allow our colleagues to fully understand how service failures make our customers feel. Whether it’s a delayed repair or a lack of communication from us, each failure has an impact on you and it’s important to understand this when building a better way of approaching complaints.
At One Manchester, we don’t handle complaints in a separate place or team. Instead, we want managers across the whole business to be able to investigate and respond directly – with empathy and respect.
To start changing the culture, we began sharing customer journey maps with our managers. These map out each stage of a complaint, from the initial problem to how it gets resolved. At each stage, we encourage our colleagues to think about the feelings, frustrations and wants you might be feeling.
Really feeling the impact of complaints helps us understand the importance in solving them with professionalism, empathy and respect. These are not just problems to solve, but opportunities to put something right.
Changing the process for the better
In 2024, we changed our Complaints Policy to align with the Housing Ombudsman’s universal definition of a complaint, making the process simpler for customers, with two clear stages, defined timescales and straightforward routes for escalation.
We also changed the way we manage complaints internally. Following training, our managers became responsible for individual complaints, working collaboratively with teams across the business to understand what had happened, problem-solve and find the right resolution for customers.
Behind the scenes, we’ve also made significant improvements to our systems. We can now track live complaints in real time, rather than relying on spreadsheets, with reports and information easily accessible throughout the life of a complaint. This gives us greater oversight of cases, helps us respond more accurately and means we can learn and improve more quickly.
We’ve also introduced a new triage stage at the start of the process, helping us understand what customers are complaining about, what outcome they’re looking for and whether they need any reasonable adjustments to help them engage with us.
Two new Complaint Resolution Officers were also recruited to support this work. They make sure case managers have the information they need, while ensuring the details customers provide are properly recorded, considered and used to help resolve complaints.
Together, these changes are helping us move from simply managing complaints to using them as an opportunity to understand what went wrong, put things right and improve the services we provide.
What comes next
Your voice is at the heart of our improvement as an organisation. From sharing your feedback to getting involved in our improvement groups, you’ve helped shape our new complaints approach.
You can continue to have your say by joining one of our panels, groups or committees, or by sharing your views through surveys.
Find out how to get involved.
