Customer charter

We aim to provide high quality, value for money services that are easy to use.

Our Customer Charter outlines how we can work together to help deliver these.

We will:

  • listen and seek to understand your needs in order to deliver an effective response
  • aim to get things right first time, and learn lessons when we don't
  • be innovative and focus on finding constructive solutions
  • make our services easy for you to use, and information quick to find on our website
  • treat you with respect, deal with you in a professional manner and explain our decisions
  • acknowledge your contact within 24 hours, and provide a full response within five days*
  • deal with your enquiry promptly or explain the reason for any delay
  • use your preferred type of contact and ensure all written correspondence is in plain English
  • tell you how well we are performing and explain what we are doing when improvement is needed

* When our systems can generate an automatic acknowledgement. Postal correspondence has a target of ten days. Where a full response is not possible within the time period, we will contact you within this period and advised of expected timescales.

We need you to:

  • give us constructive feedback about our services
  • understand that we will not always be able to give you the response you would like. If we cannot, we will explain why and try to offer alternatives
  • treat us with respect, deal with us in a professional manner and provide all relevant information
  • where appropriate, follow our policies, guidance and procedures
  • tell us about any relevant changes, or if you need additional support from us in the way we deliver our services

We will measure these by:

  • monitoring our customer feedback on a quarterly basis by asking the right questions, with a target of achieving an average overall customer satisfaction of 80%
  • maintaining a robust complaint management policy and monitor our performance against this
  • monitoring our response times, aiming to achieve 80% compliance

Our feedback will measure:

  • the quality of information provided
  • the time taken to resolve your query
  • the helpfulness of staff
  • our explanation of further actions required
  • your overall experience
  • the information on our website
  • ease of completing our online forms
  • responding to your complaints
  • improving our services
  • keeping you informed
  • delivering value for money

How are we doing? Please give us your feedback.