Our customer service and accessibility
Our service experience team
Our cross-organisational Service Experience Team continues to drive innovation in customer service. Drawing on the team’s own experience and input from the Consumer Panel and others, they develop and test improvements in our processes and provide a source of support and challenge to the wider organisation in improving our customer service.
Improvements for our users
This year the Service Experience Team embedded our new approach to complaints about our own service, developed a new approach to collecting customer feedback, and started testing our use of Trustpilot.
The team also worked with our Consumer Panel to consider potential ‘chill factors’ which may discourage a consumer from raising a complaint. We are taking forward a small number of recommendations to tackle issues within our control identified by the project.
We refreshed and updated the ‘for consumers’ section of our website. This includes guidance aimed at empowering consumers in using a lawyer and addressing issues where expectations may be different, and which could lead to a complaint. We also updated our dedicated guides for key areas of legal services, including buying and selling a property, wills, estates, family law and criminal law.
Accessibility
The accessibility of our website was checked by the Government Digital Service for compliance with public sector website accessibility regulations. We made a number of updates based on their feedback and they confirmed our accessibility statement is compliant. We commissioned a follow-up audit, including manual testing by reviewers with disabilities, to identify outstanding issues and we continue to address those. Improvements made this year included improving the accessibility of our online complaints forms and replacing a large number of pdf files with html pages.
Customer feedback
We ask everyone who makes or is the subject of a complaint what they thought of our service. We ask about the quality of the information we provided to them, how well we explained things, the time we took to deal with the complaint, if we dealt with it fairly and impartially and how helpful we were. We also provide an opportunity for free text comments.
This year we’ve updated the questions we’ll be asking in the coming year to make the survey shorter and more focused, while still providing the opportunity for people to provide more detailed comments if they wish. We’ll also be asking for feedback while the complaint is in process as well as once it has closed so we can make improvements along the way.