This year Rebecca Marsh took on additional roles and responsibilities at the Legal Ombudsman (LeO). In this edition she talks about what this means to her and shares her vision for the organisation.

“It’s been a very exciting and productive 19 months here at the Legal Ombudsman and I am very pleased to announce that I have now taken on the combined roles of Chief Ombudsman and Chief Executive. It is an honour to have been given this fantastic opportunity and look forward to leading the organisation and providing a vital service to the diverse communities we cover.

My new role fulfils the recommendations of a 2017 tailored review conducted by the Ministry of Justice’s ALB Governance Division, this called for the OLC to merge the Chief Executive and Chief Legal Ombudsman roles. The timing of the merger seemed fitting as our former Chief Executive, Rob Powell, was leaving for an exciting opportunity at Warwickshire County Council. During his time at LeO, Rob showed incredible leadership and I’d like to wish him all the very best in his future role.

Moving forwards, I am pleased to announce that we have published our 2019-20 Business Plan. Highlights from the Business Plan include an overview of the progress we have made on our Modernisation Programme, which was set up to improve performance and customer service by embedding the right culture, skills, technology and ways of working across our organisation.

The Modernisation Programme also put in place a better business infrastructure. For instance: an improved telephony service; changing how we work through a new flexible working policy; and introducing employee reward recognition schemes such as Celebrating Success. We’ve improved our IT software, and delivered a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that will make it easier for us to interrogate our data to feedback insights to the profession.

In a recent blog, I talk further about some of our plans for this year, including the exploration of mediation.

We’ve also made changes to support how consumers find out about our service. In October 2018, we launched an online Customer Assessment Tool (CAT). This was set up for people to establish instantly whether their complaints are within our jurisdiction.

Using CAT saves our investigators valuable time as they know they are only managing cases that are ready to be investigated. Since going live it has received almost 24,000 visitors; and as a result, significantly reduced the number of incoming calls to the General Enquiries Team. At least 30 percent of CAT visitors were given advice on making a complaint to their service provider or signposted to another suitable organisation.

As part of our ongoing commitment to deliver a people focused service, we have created Vulnerable Customer (VC) Champions’ roles in our General Enquiries Team to assist consumers who need that extra bit of support to progress their enquiries. In addition, our VC Champions have also contributed to staff guidance that will assist their colleagues to better recognise and support vulnerable customers.

As we move into the current business year, our Business Plan is clear that our focus will be on continuing to improve the service we provide to both service providers and consumers. This means that there is a careful balance that needs to be achieved between speed and the quality of the investigation. I want to ensure that we are getting to the right outcome in all our investigations, and in doing so, give confidence to both parties that we have fully understood the issues and got to the heart of the matter in a timely manner.

At LeO we've always sought to share the learning from our investigations – whether through courses, guidance or other avenues. I want to see this continue and develop over the future so that service providers have the opportunity and resources to deal with complaints in-house as often as possible.

All this fits in with the initial goals that I first shared with the organisation that “we need to get it right for everyone” including our customers, stakeholders and staff. I stressed the importance of equipping our people with the right tools, skills and support, to ensure that they are giving people the best experience they possibly can; and for our customers to feel that they are being heard and treated fairly.

I am confident that we are heading in the right direction and this has been echoed by associates from the wider ombudsman community who recently attended the Ombudsman Association Conference in Belfast.”