Complaints, investigations blah blah etc!

When I worked in hospitality if a customer complained, the usual way to resolve it was give something for free or take money off their bill. Occasionally a customer would complain about a member of staff and sometimes a formal meeting was required - the dreaded disciplinary....... but more often than not when this happened it was due to internal staff issues, or failure by the staff member in some way to carry out their duty correctly.


Working for the police means that when someone complains about you it has to be investigated, no giving the customer their money back here!! We have a whole department that used to be called Complaints and Discipline and is now known as PSD (Professional Standards Department)! While it is irritating, I understand that we need to be completely transparent and every complaint has to be responded too correctly. I had a complaint recently because I was unable to tell a father how long his (adult) son was going to be in custody. (I know, I left my crystal ball at home that day!). Luckily, when I was notified about the complaint, I remembered the person in question - often our complaints take so long to come through, you have no chance in actually remembering the incident. I wasn't worried, actually I was mad as I had chatted with this chap a fair bit and thought we had got on fine, but that is the way it goes and it was decided that his complaint was not valid. I won't say what I really think coz it is not very polite!!!!


As for hubby, bus drivers joke that they get disciplined for everything. They can certainly get booked for everything......being late, being early, not in the correct uniform, reversing without an inspector, not issuing the correct tickets, farting in the bus (I'm joking here), and being booked would appear to lead to a disciplinary. Not that hubby has been booked for anything yet! He did manage to break a headlight by trying to get his bus a close to the curb to let a buggy off, which was made impossible by the illegally parked car, but luckily in his disciplinary his boss was quite sympathetic, understanding that he was actually trying to do the best for the customer. But obviously the bus industry is rather over fond of disciplinaries, so much so that the amount of respect that the staff have for this process is that when they are up for a disciplinary they say they are going for 'tea and biscuits' with the boss!!


The age old saying is that the customer is always right.................bollocks is he hell, but in this cash strapped society organisations are always looking for scape goats, and in my case, our 'customers' have to be given an answer, we cannot just fob them off!!!