CHAPTER 9 | challenges in complaint handling

Introduction

Managing the large number of complaints and inquiries received each year is a major challenge for the Ombudsman's office. The scale of this challenge is captured in the office statistics for 2003–04. We received 17,496 complaints and 9,036 other approaches at our eight offices in capital cities around Australia. Complaints are made by telephone, in person, in writing (by letter, email or fax), and by use of the online complaint form on our website. An investigation staff of 69 officers handles the complaints.

The way that a complaint is dealt with by the Ombudsman's office can be as important to a person as the correctness of the decision they are complaining about. Timeliness in complaint handling is a foremost concern. There are other important challenges as well, particularly for a dispersed national office such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman. It is important to ensure consistency across the office in the way complaints are dealt with. Maintaining a uniformly high quality of service delivery is a dimension of that challenge.

'Timeliness in complaint handling is a foremost concern.'

These issues and challenges are long standing ones in the work of the Ombudsman's office and have been taken up in many ways. A principal initiative was to define the criteria for good complaint handling in A Good Practice Guide to Effective Complaint Handling, available on our website at www.ombudsman.gov.au. The guide is as useful for the office in monitoring its own standards as it is for monitoring complaint handling in agencies. A key objective of the Ombudsman's office is to model the principles and standards expressed in the Good Practice Guide. An essential step in that process has been to create a Client Service Charter that sets out the standards the office strives to achieve. The charter contains commitments to complainants about the service that can be expected from the office, ways to provide feedback, and steps that can be taken if standards are not met.

This chapter describes other steps taken by the office, over a long period of time and during 2003–04, to develop a framework and system for complaint handling. Some challenges facing the office to be taken up in 2004–05 are also noted.