Customer service

Providing customer service excellence

At TACT Fostering & Adoption, we believe strongly in providing excellence in our service to customers and endeavour to achieve this through regular consultation, involvement and engagement with our foster carers, adopters, children and young people and local authority partners. This commitment has been recognised formally by TACT achieving the Customer Service Excellence standard in 2009, the first fostering and adoption service to meet these requirements.

Comments, compliments and complaints

We carry out an annual review and analysis of all complaints received by the fostering and adoption service to ensure that these have been responded to effectively and any required learning has been undertaken by the organisation. These are benchmarked against previous years' figures to ensure progress is made. TACT has a three stage progress, download our leaflet: "Your comments, compliments and complaints". In 2010-11 we have continued to reduce the number of complaints reaching stage 2 to zero; down from two in 2009-10 and five in 2008-09. There have again been no complaints to Stage 3. This is in the context of a growing organisation with higher numbers of carers, placements and local authority contacts. If you woud like to leave us a comment, compliment or a complaint, you can

Customer surveys

We have continued to carry out a wide range of customer based surveys, including customer journey based work as well as more general service satisfaction work. During 2010-11 we have carried out surveys with young people; adoption support; adoptive parents and all newly approved foster carers and adopters. In this last survey, satisfaction scores rose in every area surveyed, e.g.: [N.B.: 10 is excellent, 0 is very poor]

  • 8.6 for the quality of information [8.2 in 2009]
  • 9.2 for the the quality of the initial visit [8.9 in 2009]
  • 8.3 for the quality of the assessment process [8.2 in 2009]
  • 8.6 for the quality of the panel experience [8.3 in 2009] 

In our adoption surveys:

  • 8.8 for the overall satisfaction score for the adoption support service.
  • 8.3 for the overall satisfaction score from adoptive parents.

Both surveys included a wide range of additional information.

In our young people’s survey these were typical responses:

  • 95.3% of children and young people placed with TACT carers thought the placement that had been made for them was the right choice.
  • 70% of young people wanted TACT to keep in touch with them after they had left.

This latter response has been responded to by recruiting a new dedicated leaving and after care resource worker in our London offices to develop a more comprehensive service to meet young people’s needs.

These are in addition to those surveys carried out with our staff group. In the last two years, independent reviews have been carried out through the Sunday Times Best 100 companies accreditation process and the results from both 2010 and 2011 have placed TACT in the Best 100 list, rising from 93 in 2010 to 31 in 2011.

Customer promise

TACT has well established customer service promises; download our leaflet: "Our customer service promise". To ensure that all our staff respond promptly, efficiently and courteously to phone calls, visits, emails and letters, all our offices are reviewed annually. In 2010-11, three offices scored 100%, the lowest being 88.3%. Typical comments from the overwhelmingly positive responses were: ‘staff are always friendly and professional’; ‘staff are wonderful and always helpful’; ‘ we love TACT!’ .

Future plans

During 2011-12, we plan to carry out an up-to-date survey of all our carers, further customer journey and service satisfaction surveys. Results of our work are communicated to staff and carers. Improvements during 2010-11 resulting for listening to our customers included improvements to reception/meeting areas in two of our offices, changes to our out-of-hours service in London, changes to our allowances system and a dedicated post for young people leaving care.

Contact details

If you want further details about our customer service ethos or our survey results, please contact David Bradley, TACT Executive Director of Performance and Quality, d.bradley@tactcare.org.uk / 020 8695 2310.