Feedback stage maintenance overview
A stage-focused approach to feedback case management supports a housing organisation's desire to ‘get it right first time’ and promotes the drive towards quicker, simpler and more streamlined complaints handling with local, early resolutions delivered by capable, well-trained staff. Complaints provide valuable information that can be used to improve customer satisfaction and may also prevent the same problems that led to the complaint from happening again. For those staff capturing feedback of all types - positive and negative - these records provide a first-hand account of the tenant's views and experience, and can highlight problems that may otherwise be missed. Handled well, complaints can give tenants a form of redress when things go wrong, and can also help the housing organisation to continuously improve its services. Typically, feedback case scenarios are segmented into stages, which may be used to define set milestones within the overall progression path, or to reflect the escalation transition points. For instance, all formal complaints may be divided into two distinct stages: Frontline Resolutions - For issues that are straightforward and easily resolved, requiring little or no investigation; and Investigations - For issues that have not been resolved at the frontline stage or that are complex, serious or potentially ‘high risk’.
All feedback cases can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA), controlled through their association to one or more stage definitions. Within each feedback stage, there are three key components of SLA compliance tracking: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded. SLA targets that are defined at stage level must transcend the individual SLA targets for the related tasks, with robust system validation rules ensuring that proposed target completion dates are synchronised. Once an SLA indicator is reached, the system can be configured to dispatch an automatic alert to individual user accounts that are associated through the stage definition, notifying them of the situation. User accounts can be linked directly to the SLA notification process or by association through their membership of an allocated role.
The allocation of feedback tasks to a stage defines how the resulting case will be progressed. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to a feedback stage although an individual task can only appear once. Where multiple tasks are required, identical in nature, separate task definitions must be created for each instance. Tasks can either be added to the stage definition and then activated manually at the point of need, or included within the workflow path, with automatic activation triggered when a new case is progressed to that particular stage.
At the point of raising a feedback case, its ownership is transferred automatically from the active stage definition, whether that be to an individual user or a group of users via membership of an allocated role. Achieved through the configuration of an allocation rule, where ownership is assigned to a specific role, all members have the opportunity to pick up the case for onward progression.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of feedback stage maintenance, including: