Complaints CultureScan

Why complaints culture matters

The social housing sector has been, and continues to be, shaped by a period of significant cultural and regulatory change. Increased scrutiny and new legislative requirements, including the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023, Awaab’s Law, and the statutory Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code, have placed unprecedented focus on how landlords listen, learn and respond to residents. Key to this is an organisation’s culture around complaints. However, while its easy to talk about culture, measuring and understanding isn’t so easy.

To understand the cultural drivers behind this challenge, Campbell Tickell developed the Complaints CultureScan©, a diagnostic tool that assesses organisational culture in relation to complaints across seven cultural pillars: Empathetic, Empowered, Structured, Progressive, Accountable, Accessible and Cultivating.

About the Complaints CultureScan

The Scan is designed to evaluate how well an organisation follows good practice and the Ombudsman’s Code when it comes to handling complaints through the lived experience of all colleagues, Board or equivalent members and customers in governance structures. This supports organisations to identify root causes, benchmark performance and develop targeted actions.

The assessment uses a diagnostic framework built upon the seven key cultural pillars to identify the difference between the intended culture and the experienced culture. This supports actionable insight and practical recommendations for organisations to build the culture that will support effective and customer focused complaints handling.

How the Complaints CultureScan works

The CultureScan process is tailored to your context. It typically includes:

Pre-Scan session – to agree objectives and tailor the focus.
Online survey (perception) – for all staff, the governing body and customer panels.
Triangulation (reality) – the results of the survey are then triangulated with Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs), any regulatory judgements or housing ombudsman determinations, as well as your annual complaints report.
Focus groups or interviews – to bring additional depth and clarity to the findings.
Playback meeting – Our findings are tested with you through a playback meeting, before being finalised into a report.

Our approach

Our overall approach is based on:

Working in active partnership with clients to achieve their objectives, while controlling consultancy costs;
Careful project management and timetabling to meet internal and external deadlines;
Applying our expertise, intelligence and experience to offer practical and innovative solutions as issues and problems arise.

Quality control is a core aspect of the way we work and the responsibility of the project lead. Our consultants have access at all times to the full range of expertise within our wider business, and our written work is subject to rigorous checks.

Client testimonials

The Complaints Culture Scan Tool was an extremely valuable exercise for our organisation. It gave us a clear and structured way to step back and reflect on our complaints culture in an objective, evidence-based manner. The findings brought together themes that had been emerging internally and provided helpful confirmation, along with greater clarity.

The process also created a safe and constructive space for key stakeholders to share their views, which strengthened engagement and openness across the organisation. It helped us clearly identify areas of strength to build upon, as well as areas requiring further focus and development. Importantly, it moved conversations beyond individual perspectives to a shared, evidence-informed understanding.

Overall, the tool has strengthened our collective understanding and supported us to move forward with greater confidence in shaping a positive complaints culture.

Saleha Gani, Head of Service Improvement, Community Gateway Association

Insights:

BLOG: Beyond the Code: Cultivating a learning culture from complaints in social housing

BLOG: Measuring the true impact of your complaints handling process

Find out about our original CultureScan tool for measuring organisational culture.

Who we are

Campbell Tickell is an expert leadership consultancy for organisations tackling the challenges that shape lives, communities and futures.We provide high quality services, problem-solving and advice, primarily to charitable, not-for-profit and public sector organisations. We are committed to delivering positive social benefit through our work.

Find out more about us.