B&NES Customer Charter
Information about our new Customer Charter.
Details
We have developed our Customer Charter to help explain our expectations for how we propose to deliver the best customer experience, whilst also explaining how our customers can help us to achieve this.
Included within our Customer Charter is the 'Respect our colleagues' statement, which clarifies our stance on unreasonable customer behaviour, and is based on our new Violent, Threatening, Aggressive and Challenging Behaviour policy launched internally earlier this year.
What we will do
- Make it easy for you to access our services, increasing what you can do online and ensure there are alternative routes for those who cannot use digital options
- Make sure we take into account any accessibility needs
- Treat you equitably and courteously, respect your privacy and the confidentiality of any information you give us
- Be clear about what we can or cannot do, including the eligibility requirements for some services
- Do as much as we can to resolve your query at first contact, and if we can't, we'll make sure you know what will happen next and when
- Listen and learn from your feedback to improve what we do
- Monitor our performance against our Customer Service standards
How you can help
We want to get you the right help as quickly as we can. You can help us to do this, by:
- Accessing our services online, if you can
- Telling us what your enquiry is about, as clearly and briefly as possible
- Providing us with all the information we need to help you
- Asking us to explain anything that you're not sure of
In order to help us deliver the best service that we can, please be considerate to our staff and other customers. We would appreciate it if you could let us know when you have received good service, or when things have gone wrong so we can work out how to improve.
Please let us know of any changes that will be relevant to the services we provide to you (a change of address, for example) and if you have an appointment with one of our services, please be punctual, or let us know if you're unable to attend.
Respect our colleagues
We know that things go wrong sometimes, and we respect your right to feed back to us. We have a duty of care to all our colleagues, and we won't accept any behaviour that is hurtful, hateful, or abusive towards our staff or customers.
Unreasonable behaviours
Aggressive, violent, threatening, challenging or abusive behaviour that could be physically or emotionally harmful, hateful, discriminative, negative or obstructive towards our employees and other service users.
Unreasonable behaviour that impacts on our ability to carry out work
This means behaviour that starts to impact excessively on the work or wellbeing of our colleagues, takes up an excessive amount of time, or when dealing with the matter disadvantages other customers or service users.
Unreasonable levels of contact that impact our ability to deliver services
This includes making excessive levels of contact that can be considered as harassment.
Hate crime or hate incidents
Hate crime is any unwanted behaviour which is intended to or creates the effect of violating a person's dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that person. It can be motivated by prejudice on the basis of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, sex, gender reassignment or other grounds.
Our response
We will ask you to stop so we can explain why your behaviour is unacceptable. If you continue to behave in a challenging way, we will end the conversation and request that you leave or finish the call. We may also blocked you on our social media accounts, or we may decide not to answer your correspondence.
If repeat behaviour occurs, we have the right to exclude you from our premises or limit your contact with us until the issue is resolved, in order to protect our colleagues and other customers. If unwelcome behaviour continues, we will involve our security and legal teams, as well as the police, to manage the incident.
Giving feedback
If you would like to give us feedback on how your issue was handled, you can use our Have your say page.
Documents
Last updated 03 October 2023