The candidate service recently removed their complaints form because:
- it’s easier for users to understand how to get in touch if there are fewer contact methods
- the support team did not receive notifications when a user submitted the Google form, making it hard for them to monitor complaints
- the Google form did not look official as it did not use the design system
We decided to remove the complaints form from our service for the same reasons. We want providers to use email or online chat to contact us.
We have not removed the feedback form which is linked to from the phase banner, which is a different Google form.
What we changed
We changed the link in the phase banner from “give feedback or report a problem” to “your feedback will help us to improve it.” This is the standard wording in the design system.
We did this because we want providers to use the feedback form only for feedback which does not need an immediate response.
We removed the “Make a complaint about this service” link from the footer. We do not think we need a separate complaints page because:
- the email address and online chat details are in the footer
- very few users visited the complaints page - there were only 4 unique visits to the page from 27 August to 26 November 2021
Other considerations
We considered keeping the complaints page, removing the link to the form and just giving the email address and a link to online chat. We decided not to do this because the page would exactly replicate what is in the footer.
We considered changing ‘Get help’ in the footer to ‘Get help or make a complaint’. We decided that this puts too much emphasis on complaints, particularly since very few users have ever clicked on the complaints link.
We expect that users will continue to contact us using the details in the footer if they want to make a complaint.
We want to consider replacing or removing the feedback form in a future piece of work. We could ask providers to give feedback by email or online chat, but the form also contains a satisfaction survey so we need to find out more about:
- who uses the satisfaction survey and what it is used for
- whether the results of the survey are meaningful
- what the consequences would be if we removed it
If we find that we still need the satisfaction survey, we could consider replacing the Google form with a survey within our service.
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