CHAPTER 5 | Challenges in complaint handling

A continuing challenge for any Ombudsman’s office is to remain adaptable, flexible and responsive. While the fundamentals of good complaint handling do not change, the nature and scale of the issues dealt with can change markedly, particularly when there are major new government initiatives, substantial legislative changes, or unforeseen difficulties in government administration.

Staff in the Ombudsman’s office must be specially selected and properly trained to undertake their core complaint handling and investigation roles. Their skills need to be updated regularly to take account of new areas of expertise the office must develop to meet the requirements of the time.

‘…the nature and scale of the issues dealt with can change markedly …’

Work practices must be subject to continual evaluation and improvement. This helps ensure a high level of service for all complainants and stakeholders. It also enables the office to optimise the use of technology to manage complaints and provide efficiencies, and to draw out the intelligence from dealing with many thousands of individual complaints to improve public administration more broadly.

The office needs to be vigilant in identifying and reaching those people who may be most in need of our services. This target group can change over time, depending, for example, on the nature of particular government programs or community demographics. Often these people will be at some disadvantage in dealing with government agencies, for reasons such as location, language, education levels or illness. In some cases it is best to make intermediaries aware of our services, so they can refer people to us when the need arises.

We also need to make sure that we use themost appropriate communication methods for different people. For example, we cannot assume that all people have access to the internet, email or a reliable telephone service.

This chapter describes some of our efforts in this regard during 2007–08. A particular focus of attention for the office has been dealing effectively with the issues arising from the implementation of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). Thisaspect of our work is described more fully in the section on Indigenous issues in Chapter 7—Looking at the agencies.

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Responding to complaint-handling challenges

Work practice and system changes | Relations with government agencies | Survey of complainants | Difficult or unreasonable conduct by complainants

Work practice and system changes

One of the strategic priorities of the office is to build on the work practice and system changes of the past several years, to deliver improved timeliness, efficiency and effectiveness in managing complaints, conducting inspections and generating reports. In 2005–06 we introduced a raft of changes to our work practices to improve the consistency, effectiveness and efficiency of complaint handling. These changes were refined during 2006–07 and 2007–08.

The work practice changes that were introduced included:

• adopting a five-tier category structure for categorising and escalating complaints
• creating a Public Contact Team
• redeveloping the Work Practice Manual
• designing and implementing a new complaint management system
• changing the way we handle requests for review of our decisions.

During 2007–08 we conducted an external post-implementation review of the changes and convened an internal working party to consider whether complaint work can be managed more efficiently.

The consultant who conducted the external post-implementation review concluded that, due to the absence of appropriate performance data, it was not possible to determine whether many of the possible measures of success had been achieved in the office. In part this was not surprising, as due to the extent of the changes in many cases the systems and work practices in place prior to the introduction of the changes did not provide a good basis for comparison. Nevertheless, the consultant found that overall feedback from staff on the impact of the work practice changes was positive. The consultant concluded that the changes were effective and resulted in increased consistency in decision making.

The consultant identified a number of areasfor further improvement, such as improving project management, ensuring that senior leaders in the office sponsored the change process on a continuous basis, and establishing meaningful performance measures and management information. Inaddition, a number of other detailed recommendations aimed at improving ourcomplaint-management processes weremade.

The internal working party also recommended some further changes to the way we manage complaints. In particular, they recommended changes to the organisational structure for handling complaints about agencies which generally attract a small number of complaints, to provide us with a greater insight into current and emerging issues, and to facilitate the management of agency relationships.

The changes we have implemented in response to the reviews include:

• creating an Information Management Committee to ensure that the development of information technology, work practices and governance strategies align with a whole-of-office approach to information management
• reviewing the functionality of the interactive voice recognition system used by the Public Contact Team and starting acomplete reconfiguration of the system to improve people’s capacity to contact theoffice
• developing a new, risk-based quality assurance framework
• revising the process for identifying and recording administrative deficiency
• developing a suite of management reports for managers and the Executive
• starting work on implementing an electronic records management system
• refining our complaint management system, providing better information to staff on how to use it, and commencing a review of the structure and content of the Work Practice Manual
• centralising the handling of complaints about taxation and defence-related matters in Canberra, and transferring the Postal Industry Ombudsman specialist function to Melbourne and the Child Support Agency specialist function to Sydney
• moving to an arrangement where teams, rather than specific individuals, are responsible for managing the work relating to particular portfolios.

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Relations with government agencies

Our capacity to deal effectively with complaints, and to help improve public administration, is influenced by the nature of our relationship with government agencies. Where relations are good, most complaints can be dealt with quickly with a minimum of formality, and individual or systemic problems can be resolved readily. Additional benefits are that the Ombudsman’s office can provide early warning of any emerging problems, and can assist agencies by providing advice in our areas of specialty, such as improving complaint handling or public administration.

In order to gauge the state of our relationship with agencies and to identify areas for improvement, we commissioned an independent market research company to undertake a survey of Australian and ACT Government agencies on our behalf.

The survey results showed that the role of the office is accepted and well regarded, with most respondents agreeing on the importance of the office and its impartiality. For example:

• 86% of the respondents rated the performance of the office as good or better
• 87% rated their personal experience with the office as good or better
• 77% considered the office demonstrates the necessary professional skills, and 12% were neutral on the question
• 76% considered the office is independent and impartial, and 15% were neutral on the question.

Some specific areas for improvement noted were:

• the level and quality of our engagement with agencies about which we receive few complaints
• the extent to which recommendations are followed through by the agencies and, conversely, the extent to which our office follows up agency implementation of recommendations
• our timeliness and consistency in dealing with complaints
• our advice to agencies about progress with complaints and regular reporting
• our knowledge and understanding of some agencies and the environment in which they operate
• our role in providing information on general matters of public administration.

We are acting on these findings. While we are committed to improving our performance it is worth noting that the consultants who undertook the survey were impressed with the positive results that we achieved.

‘…the role of the office is accepted and well regarded …’

As noted earlier in this chapter, we have changed the allocation of responsibilities for dealing with complaints about those agencies which usually generate only a few complaints to the office. This should provide a greater depth of expertise about these agencies, a higher level of consistency in the way we deal with these complaints, a greater capacity to identify any systemic issues, and a better capacity to manage agency relationships.

In February 2008 we launched a series of Ombudsman e-bulletins, available from our website and through an email subscription. The purpose of this series is to relay to a wider audience, particularly staff in agencies, a sample of recent complaints and the lessons that can be drawn from them. We plan to produce three e-bulletins each year, describing some recent Ombudsman case studies. The central message in each case study is that a problem or complaint in a single case can point to a larger issue that may need to be addressed by an agency.

We have also sought to improve the quality and amount of information we provide to agencies about various aspects of the work of the Ombudsman’s office. We developed a detailed guide on the work of the Ombudsman’s office, aimed primarily at staff in agencies, to help people understand more about the range of work we do and how we go about it. In addition we developed a series of fact sheets to help explain particular aspects of our work in more detail. The detailed guide and the first two fact sheets were released early in 2008–09.

Survey of complainants

Periodically the office surveys complainants as this is one way to measure our performance and to identify areas for improvement in service delivery. Such surveys also provide information which helps us better target our outreach activities.

Late in the reporting period we commissioned an independent market research company to undertake a survey of complainants. The survey aims to obtain information on three key aspects—access, demographics and quality of service. The survey is being conducted as a multi-stage process. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten complainants prior to 2000 complainants being surveyed in June 2008. We will report on the survey results in the 2008–2009 annual report.

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Difficult or unreasonable conduct by complainants

As discussed in the last two annual reports, we have been participating in a cross-agency project, coordinated by the New South Wales Ombudsman’s office, to develop and trial management strategies for complainants who behave unreasonably. Earlier in the project, an interim practice manual was developed and training provided to staff in all Commonwealth, state and territory Ombudsman offices in Australia. Given the strong interest from staff in other agencies who deal with complaints, the manual and training are available widely. Data on the effectiveness of the management strategies has been collected and a final version of the practice manual will be released early in 2008–09.

CHAPTER 5Challenges in complaint handling

Community engagement and public awareness

Getting our message out to people in regional and rural Australia remains a key priority for the office. We aim to ensure that people receiving and accessing government services, and key stakeholders and community information ‘gatekeepers’, knowwho we are, what we do and how to contact us.

In 2007–08 our staff were involved in 171 outreach activities across all states and territories, continuing our aim of conducting or participating in an average of at least two focused outreach activities each week during the year. This was a 47% increase on the previous year, due mainly to our outreach work associated with the NTER.

Our outreach activities included:

• providing information on the role of the Ombudsman to all new and continuing federal members and senators in recognition of the role played by local members in resolving complaints about Australian Government agencies
• the Ombudsman and staff meeting with heads of agencies and senior staff in each capital city to emphasise the importance of working cooperatively to resolve complaints
• conducting roundtable discussions with migration agents, community groups and other immigration stakeholders in all state capital cities in our Immigration Ombudsman role
• conducting repeated outreach visits to Indigenous prescribed communities and town camps in the Northern Territory, utilising information and outreach items targeted at informing Indigenous people of the role of the office
• visiting Defence Force establishments to highlight the Defence Force Ombudsman role
• participating in joint activities with Australian Government agencies and other Ombudsman offices such as the Child Support Agency Community Information Sessions, the NSW Good Service Forum, and NAIDOC week
• presenting papers at conferences and forums such as the National Employment Services Association Conference and the International Conference of Information Commissioners
• distributing Commonwealth Ombudsman publications to relevant information outlets.

We work with other Ombudsmen to jointly promote our services. We participated in a joint program of information sessions at ten universities in Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney during orientation week in February 2008. Staff from our office joined with representatives from the Banking and Financial Services Ombudsman, Energy Ombudsman Queensland, the Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW, Energy and Water Ombudsman Victoria, the Public Transport Ombudsman Victoria, the Tasmanian Ombudsman and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

The events provided the opportunity to engage with the student population, to explain the role of an Ombudsman, the types of issues students can complain aboutand to which office they should take their concerns.

We also participated in a joint initiative of the Australian and New Zealand Ombudsman Association, to produce and distribute material targeted to the youth market.

In the coming year, a strategic priority for our office is to target outreach, relevant publications and communication activities to key stakeholders, particularly through intermediaries.

Jack Richardson Prize

In 2002 the Ombudsman’s office established the Australian National University (ANU) Jack Richardson Prize in Administrative Law in recognition of the contributions made by the first Commonwealth Ombudsman, who was also a former professor of law at the ANU. The annual prize is for the best essay by an undergraduate student in administrative law. This year’s Jack Richardson Prize was awarded to Sarah Bishop.

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