Providing an exceptional user experience
‘Our values of impartiality and fairness drive everything that we do. In living those values it is vital that we give people and organisations the best possible experience of working with us.’ Our strategy 2025 to 2026
We want to centre our service around the people who use it so we can provide an exceptional user experience. We will listen to people’s feedback to help us improve and to involve them in future decisions about how we work.
Our Public Engagement Advisory Group (PEAG)
Our independent PEAG gives us an important external perspective on our work. The PEAG includes people from a diverse range of backgrounds, including both people who have complained to us before and some who have not. This means we can capture different views and experiences. The PEAG provides feedback on different topics to make sure we learn from their experiences and continue improving our service. Members can be part of the group for up to two years. We then invite new members so we can continue to hear different voices and perspectives.
Our PEAG members have provided feedback on a range of topics, including how we can provide an empathetic service and how we can best manage demand.
Training delivered to caseworkers includes first-hand accounts from people who have shared their experiences of when things go wrong in public services. This helps our caseworkers to understand the impacts on people when things go wrong and is a powerful reminder of how important empathy is to our complainants.
It is important that we have different ways for people to contact us. Either speaking to us on the phone or writing to us could be a barrier for some people. To make it easier to complain, we are expanding our digital self-service offer so that people can submit complaints and evidence online and track their complaint.
Not everyone has access to technology. For example, a Women and Equalities Committee report showed that 29% of adults aged over 75 do not have internet access at home, compared to 6% of all adults. By improving access to our online services we will have more time to speak with people who find it difficult to access technology.
We will continue to adjust our service for disabled people to address the barriers they can face when bringing a complaint to us. For example, we will help someone fill out a complaint form over the phone if they have difficulty writing.
We will review data on the disability of complainants and the reasonable adjustments offered through our casework. This will help us understand the types of barriers people experience and will inform any changes we could make to how we manage complaints.
We collect data and feedback about our service throughout the complaint journey using surveys, telephone research and feedback that people give us directly.
Having a better understanding of the lived experience of our complainants is vital to providing an exceptional user experience. We have a diverse workforce at PHSO. We also know that our leadership teams are less representative of the community than other parts of the organisation and this is something we need to continue to work towards improving. We do this by taking active steps through our recruitment and selection processes to increase accessibility and attract candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds. We also monitor statistics through the different stages of our process to better understand candidate journeys through an EDI lens.