Complaints stage one – frontline resolution

Your complaint will be allocated to a trained member of our team who will support you along the complaints process.

Our frontline colleagues have the specialist knowledge needed to resolve complaints quickly and effectively. A response may therefore be provided directly to you by any of our staff, including our maintenance and repairs teams – Evolve Facility Services or Riverside Direct.

We will contact you by the end of the next working day to resolve or agree with you what will happen next. A written acknowledgment outlining next steps will be sent within two working days of receipt of your complaint.

We will aim to respond and put complaints right within 10 working days.

Complaints stage two – review

If you’re unhappy with the resolution provided at stage one, you can contact us to ask us to escalate your complaint for review. This is referred to as a Review-Stage Two complaint. At this point, you can let us know why you feel the issue is unresolved and what you think should have been done to resolve it. We will aim to send out a written acknowledgment of your complaint within two working days from your receipt of your complaint.

Further investigation and review will take place and we aim to do this and provide a final resolution within 20 days. In exceptional circumstances only, the senior manager conducting the review will contact you in order to agree an extension.

The Riverside Group is committed to providing high quality services in everything we do and to resolve customer complaints in a consistent, fair, impartial, and transparent way. We realise that there will be occasions where the level of service falls below our accepted standard and we will work to put things right and this may include paying redress

We aim to be consistent in our approach to redress and financial redress payments ensuring customers are not left out of pocket by our actions and we will calculate redress by assessing each case by its impact on the customer we are aligned to the Housing Ombudsman Service remedies guidance.

We will always consider whether any statutory payments are due, if any quantifiable losses have been incurred, the time and trouble a resident has been put to as well as any distress and inconvenience caused.

You can ask someone else to act on your behalf. As long as we have your permission we can discuss and resolve your complaint with them.

If your complaint is not resolved by us, you can take your complaint directly to the Ombudsman.

The Housing Ombudsman Service can also assist residents throughout the life of a complaint and not just at the point where you have been through our process to encourage earlier and more effective complaint resolution.

For more details about our policy click here.

As with all our complaints, these are triaged to the most relevant person to deal with the complaint.

We will accept complaints about staff and contractor conduct and aim to provide a suitable solution on completion of the complaint investigation.

However due to the nature of this type of investigation we would not be able to provide information regarding any disciplinary action. No person who is the subject of a complaint will take part in the investigation process. If the complaint relates to protected characteristics, an Investigating Manager who has the same or similar protected characteristics to the customer raising the complaint will be appointed to carry out the investigation wherever possible.