HM Revenue and Customs: Gathering customer insight and acting on feedback
HMRC has continued to improve its complaints service in 2017-18 by introducing more proactive calls to customers who complain, in an effort to deal with their concerns quickly.
It has also expanded its popular complaints “iForm” to 95% of its customers, rolling this out to businesses as well as individuals.
HMRC says it has received valuable feedback from both the Adjudicators Office and the Ombudsman, highlighting areas where it still needs to improve. This has included recommendations on:
- simplifying letters to customers
- improving understanding of the impact that delays can have on customers
- providing more support to help staff handle complaints with more empathy.
HMRC told us that it had taken this feedback on board by improving staff training and simplifying some high-volume customer correspondence so it is clearer to customers.
To understand more about how its work is impacting on customers, HMRC has put in place tools to help it listen to, and act on, insight from customers across all channels used to contact the Department. In addition to insight specifically from complaints, this now also includes feedback from social media, webchat, telephone and online services.
HMRC says that while it has more to do, the organisation is taking action to treat the root causes of problems and to build better new services, or improve existing ones.