ILM Level 5 Examples

Think for a moment about your own team’s reaction to complaints. When a customer complains what is your work team’s usual reaction? Which answer best describes their usual behaviour and attitude? How does this reaction impact on your customer’s perception of you as an organisation?
I try to encourage my team to regard the complaint positively and use it as an opportunity to strengthen links with the complaining customer. In many cases, however, I would say that my work team’s usual reaction would be to listen carefully and deal with the problem promptly and efficiently. Customer services training given to my team, together with guidance in team meetings, encourages each individual to take ownership of the complaint and use it as a learning experience that helps them to improve the service given to customers. I encourage discussion of complaints and how they have been handled and, as a team, we look at how something could have been done better. I try to ensure there is no
‘blame culture’ to avoid staff feeling the need to cover up mistakes or complaints. I am aware of other teams whose members have refused to accept complaints as a positive and they have been defensive and argumentative with customers which have caused enormous difficulties for our organisation.

As a public sector body I feel it is even more important that we offer the best possible customer service. Just because our ‘customers’ cannot go anywhere else for our services does not give us the right to be complacent in our complaint handling processes. As a team we have made every effort to do our best to satisfy our customers’ demands and expectations. There have been a number of occasions when complaints have turned into compliments and these are then used as examples of best practice in training sessions.

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