Complaint as a Resource

Returning to the PLUS survey, while seeing the overall numbers go up is obviously good for morale, the real value of these things is the opportunities they give to improve the service.

There will be some indications from disparities in the closed questions.  For instance, a low rise in satisfaction at one particular branch might highlight some problems there.  However, the survey has also come back with about 1,500 responses to an open box type question at the end of the survey.  It will be a while before these are analysed in detail, but when they are they should throw up opportunities for further improvement.  I have been given an impressionistic sample and as you might imagine they vary enormously in subject matter.  Some are just general"what a nice library" type comments; others are very specific niggles like "the toilets need to be cleaned more often"; still others are disputes between different groups of users.  The most common of these are basically noise vs silence.  In this case, you can't just "solve" the problem, you need to balance conflicting groups of users.  However, every complaint should be viewed as an opportunity for improvement.

If you do have cause for complaint, I would just like to add one plea.  Try to keep your temper and be polite to the staff you are complaining to.  It may not be their fault, and all the parts of the Council are finding themselves more stretched than they were three years ago.  If you are staff member getting complaints all the time, it can be easy to feel a bit put upon and defensive.  Of course, this applies to all the different Council services.