Investigations will be completed by following our six-step complaints guidance. Summarised below:
1. Thank you for your feedback, apologise for your dissatisfaction, and reassure you that they will take ownership of your complaint.
2. Identify what outcome you are looking for from your complaint, and advise you on what you can reasonably expect from the process.
3. Investigate the complaint thoroughly. This will normally involve meeting with you to discuss the circumstances of your complaint.
4. Make a decision based on the findings of the complaint.
5. Take action and look for a long-term fix. This might involve changing or improving our processes for the benefit of all our customers. At this point, we will write to you to explain our findings and the outcome of your complaint.
6. Share the learning with colleagues. We do this when we have investigated complaints to help us understand what went wrong to ensure that we don’t make the same mistake again for you or any of our other customers.
Investigating Officers will have a timescale of ten working days in which to carry out their investigation and contact you with an outcome. They will make initial contact with you within the first three working days of being assigned the complaint. If for any reason a mutually agreeable outcome is not achieved within this timescale, your complaint will automatically be escalated to the next stage of our complaints process.
Where a complaint involves a potential insurance claim, litigation, prosecution, disciplinary investigation, health and safety investigator or other circumstance that may give rise to external intervention, the Chief Executive may suspend the complaints process and delay time scales provided he informs you and explains the reasons.
A complainant may withdraw their concern at any time, however, we may continue to investigate if we feel that it is necessary to do so. Actions taken will be recorded on Bron Afon’s contact management system – YODA.
At the end of an investigation, where appropriate, a written outcome, such as a letter or email will be produced. In more serious circumstances, we may choose to produce a report or utilise the case for a wider lessons learnt review.
We will make it clear that you can escalate your complaint to the second stage, however, we
may ask you to provide additional guidance to confirm:
• Desired outcome, and how that is different from the original investigation.
• What inaccuracies occurred during the previous investigation that led to your escalation request.
If you wish to appeal a decision and escalate your complaint to Stage 2, we ask that you inform us within 14 days of the outcome of your initial investigation. Notification outside of this timeframe may result in you having to restart our complaints process.
