Compliance and Complaints Officer

A 12-month fixed term contract opportunity has arisen to join our Compliance and Complaints Team, responsible for handling Statutory, Corporate and Ombudsman complaints. This is an exciting opportunity for someone to be part of a busy and high achieving team, full of variety and challenges.

As a Complaints Officer, you will be responsible for managing a caseload of complex complaints from residents and service users in in Essex, supporting directorates with good complaint handling and providing consistent responses within statutory complaints timescales. Excellent inter-personal, communication and organisational skills are required to liaise with managers and complainants to ensure responses meet the required standards and the procedure is appropriately followed within designated timescales.

We are passionate about supporting service areas to use learning from customer feedback and complaints to identify actions which make a difference to Essex Residents.,

• Day to day you will undertake a broad range of activities to ensure ECC remains compliant in relation to complaint management and delivering a high standard of responses to escalated executive enquiries, corporate and statutory complaints.


• Work with colleagues across ECC to ensure that complaints are responded to within the relevant timescales and the complaints policy is adhered to.


• Take ownership and responsibility for complaint case management. Including undertaking research and identifying learning opportunities, making recommendations to the organisation.


• Prepare and quality assure complaint responses for Managers, Senior Leaders and Chief Executive to sign off. You will therefore need to establish effective working relationships quickly with colleagues across directorates.
  
  Experience of working within a customer resolution environment, particularly working within sensitive information with the ability to be tactful and diplomatic.


• Excellent communication skills both oral and written communications to understand and resolve complaints demonstrating empathy and an understanding of the customer.


• Good organisational skills and an ability to work to tight deadlines, prioritise own work, use own initiative and be self-motivating.


• Previous experience of dealing with people who are dissatisfied or unhappy.


Desirable

• A good knowledge and experience of complaint handling in a local government/health setting, particularly within the Corporate/Ombudsman remit and/or statutory complaints.


• Excellent Attention to detail, meticulous at record keeping to ensure we are compliant with statutory duties.


• An awareness of the importance of client confidentiality and data protection.
  
  As part of employment with Essex County Council (ECC) should your role require a DBS check you will be required to register with the DBS update service. The DBS update service ensures all registered DBS certificates are kept up to date and allows authorised parties to view the status of your certificate. This is an annual subscription, and you will be responsible for ensuring this is maintained. For further information on the DBS update service please go to https://www.gov.uk/dbs-update-service
  
  What's in it for you?


• Healthy work life balance; flexible and hybrid working options


• Wide range of learning and development opportunities


• IT equipment and home-working equipment supplied


• Competitive annual leave + bank holidays + choice to buy extra


• Generous Local Government Salary related pension scheme


• Access to our health and wellbeing support platform with Vita Health Group


• Access to hundreds of discounts and benefits through Essex Rewards


• Up to 4 days per annum volunteering leave