Complaints Handling – RICS Guidance Notes.
Dr Oonagh McDonald’s report ‘Balancing Risk and Reward: Recommendations for a Sustainable Valuation Profession in the UK’ identified effective complaint handling and sustainability of the valuation profession.
This Guidance Note from RICS uses this as their starting point. It pulls together the extensive knowledge gained by residential valuation firms, their insurers and their legal advisers during the challenging years of the financial crisis.
Based on the enquiries we get at BlueBox partners, this publication is well timed. Whether on the phone or over a coffee at conferences, we get numerous sole traders and owners of small practices asking our advice on best way to handle complaints. This well written publication can help them in this process.
Although the publication covers the full range of matters, we think the sections covering the early stages of the complaint are particularly useful. This includes:
- Receiving a complaint – initial actions and responses;
- Evaluating a complaint;
- Initial response to the claimant; and
- Additional investigations.
The appendices also include a list of relevant RICS help sheets and other references and a flow chart that illustrates the ‘life of a complaint.’
Many small organisations don’t have the benefit of a friendly technical section at head office who can help them deal with challenging customers – most sole traders have to cope with this on their own. Although this Guidance Note won’t make these complaints go away it can at least provide you with a step-by-step approach of how they can be handled.
For more information see: http://www.rics.org/uk/regulation1/complaints1/