Health and Safety's customer service standards

We want to provide a high quality service to all our stakeholders. Below are the standards we aim to meet.

Our general approach

In all our dealings with stakeholders, we will:

• be professional, polite and punctual
• treat you with respect, listening carefully to your views and taking your needs seriously
• use plain language, not jargon.

Telephone calls

When dealing with telephone calls, we’ll:

• try to answer within six rings. If team members aren’t available, we’ll make sure appropriate cover arrangements are in place
• tell you who you’re speaking to and confirm that you’re through to the Health and Safety Team
• take a message or give you an alternative contact number if we can’t transfer your call
• aim to deal with your message within one working day. If this isn’t possible, we’ll let you know why and when we will be able to respond.

Letters, e-mails and faxes

When dealing with your letters, e-mails or faxes, we will:

• let you know who is dealing with your enquiry or request, if it’s not the person you contacted
• respond within five working days. If we can’t answer your query or provide the service you want within that time, we’ll acknowledge your contact and let you know when we plan to respond
• make sure cover arrangements are in place if individual team members aren’t available. Letters and faxes will be referred on when this is appropriate. For e-mail, we’ll use the ‘out-of office assistant’ reply function. We’ll make sure the message you get includes when a team member expects to be available, and gives an alternative contact point for help and advice.

Requests for service

When dealing with your requests for service, we will:

• provide an acknowledgement within five working days
• respond as soon as possible. Our broad remit and current workloads mean that we do have to prioritise how team resources are used. We will make sure issues, such as serious accidents and incidents, and concerns about imminent danger are evaluated and get a priority response when this is appropriate.

Involving and informing stakeholders

We want to keep our stakeholders informed and involved. We’ll do this by:

• producing and publicising information about our services that is accurate, useful and up to date
• providing information in other languages and formats where needed
• developing and publicising a communication strategy for OH&S
• using a range of consultation processes to encourage stakeholder involvement in our work
• developing and using feedback mechanisms, such as questionnaires and surveys
• developing performance monitoring arrangements and reporting our findings.

Compliments, comments or complaints

If you have any compliments, comments or complaints about our service, email Employee.HealthandSafety@derby.gov.uk.

We will:

• record the points you make and deal with them appropriately
• respond to all complaints within 10 working days
• treat complaints confidentially, while making sure everyone involved is dealt with fairly
• use your comments to improve our services
• tell you how you can take your complaint further if you’re not satisfied with our response
• apologise when we’re at fault and take action to put things right.