CTC Membership Services

Anything relating to the clubs associated with Cycling UK
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Si
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Si »

As promised previously, here is an official explanation as to why members of NO rarely become involved in forum debates.
Please note that in the "please let me know" bit, the "me" is your councillor or K.Mayne. Please don't take this up with the forum moderators - we are only the messengers and are not in a position to influence anything.

The source that this quote is cited from is to be found below it - the quote is the second section from the bottom. You will notice that some of the quote has time dependent information in it, as such the original might change in the future.

CTC Complaints Procedure and Forums.

Kevin Mayne, CTC Director, 18th November 2009.

The Moderator has asked me to clarify two issues in relation to how CTC’s complaints procedure records complaints and the monitoring of complaints on the CTC Forum.

Background

CTC’s Complaints Procedure is a policy of CTC Council. It is operated by staff on behalf of the Council. As Director I am expected to maintain the process to their expectations and to ensure that it is applied across all areas of CTC, excluding CTC Holidays and Tours which has to have its own procedures for legal reasons.

It is run as one process to cover all complaints on all topics including complaints or disciplinary issues that arise at member group level.

How does complaint monitoring work?

The full complaints procedure is initiated if a member formally asks for it to be used but complaints monitoring starts at our first point of contact with a member.

We expect the vast majority of complaints to be dealt with by the person who is contacted by the member. We try to record every contact with a member on their record even if the matter is immediately resolved. Everything considered a failure of CTC service is recorded as such even if the member doesn’t complain. Therefore we are recording detail such as missing cards or magazines as complaints to get a picture of any underlying level of concern.

If a member escalates a complaint to their councillor or to me I expect to see if they have previously contacted the membership department or national office. In all but a few cases I find that the record is present. If there is no record the issue of record keeping itself is escalated within the relevant department.

If a complaint is serious or isn’t dealt with adequately at first contact then we encourage members to contact me directly. I see all the complaints as they arrive and I deal with them or issue them to a relevant staff to deal with in my name. Again I record them in our contacts system to ensure I have a handle on the issues I deal with.

If a member doesn’t like my handling of their complaint or believes that this is an issue of CTC policy there are further avenues of escalation.

Monitoring complaints on the forum.

Both full Council and Council Committee which oversees the Complaints Procedure have debated the monitoring of complaints on the forum a number of times. The current position is set out here, but we are going to debate it again at a forthcoming Management Committee meeting so if you have views please let me know.

On each occasion the subject has been debated it was concluded that staff could not effectively deal with complaints raised on the forum, a policy that is also applied to members’ letters to Cycle magazine. Moderators and the Editor have been briefed on this policy and asked to remind users of the procedure whenever appropriate.

The main reasons that staff should not participate were:

-The forum cannot provide adequate record keeping, privacy or data protection controls which are provided by the complaints procedure.

-Some of our services such as insurance are externally regulated and we have to respond directly to the complainant.

-The forum is a place for debate and comment, Council felt it is an inappropriate use of staff time to have debates about complaints in this environment.

-Staff work to the policies of Council and it is inappropriate for staff to be commenting on Council policy in this environment.


http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3655

edit: added the explanatory section to the quote.
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Simon L6
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Simon L6 »

I think it's up to the Chair to comment. Given that we have members who paid their subs in September being asked to produce bank statements to prove as much, and that Councillors weren't informed of the September 'glitch' at the Council meeting in October, he might start by telling us how much he knew and when. But we'll probably have to wait for the in-house National Office forum dedicated to gaining a 'yes' vote at the 2010 AGM........
Jamesy
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Jamesy »

This topic, and the comments within, will encourage people to join the CTC will it? :?
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". Robert G. Ingersoll
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Simon L6
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Simon L6 »

Jamesy wrote:This topic, and the comments within, will encourage people to join the CTC will it? :?


Jamesy - some of us have signed up dozens of members for the CTC, by the simple expedient of showing them a good time on club rides. And some of us have chased the membership department and the national office for action when individual memberships and, on one occasion, entire groups have had their accounts fouled up. And some of us think that it's getting worse, not better, and that there's a deal of burying of bad news.
Biking Bill
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Biking Bill »

So are your complaints in the system Simon?
Is kevin mayne lying when he says on the web page in Si's post that he is only getting a handful of complaints?
thirdcrank
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by thirdcrank »

Biking Bill

Speaking personally, I'm sure that Kevin Mayne is completely correct as you quote him and I don't think I've read anybody contradicting him. OTOH - if you read the report now available on the CTC website into the the membership system (and I'm not going to plough through it all again just to find the exact words) it does suggest that the only complaints logged are those made in writing at director level. It's arguably the rest - the people who don't want to make a fuss and so on - that really should concern somebody.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edited to add: Found it.

Other than those received in writing at Director level, there appears to be no formal process at CTC or arvato for complaints.
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Simon L6
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Simon L6 »

Biking Bill wrote:So are your complaints in the system Simon?
Is kevin mayne lying when he says on the web page in Si's post that he is only getting a handful of complaints?

I've no idea how many complaints there are now, but when he says that the number of complaints coming through forums has decreased I'm sure he's right - I no longer ask people to get in touch with me, and no longer make complaints to the National Office or Arvato because I'm no longer on Council. Although I'm bound to say that I didn't complain to the Director - most of the complaints went to Matt Malinder and Peter Jackson.

Mind you - whether he gets them or not it might be worth going back to the contributions made by Regulator to this thread, and reading the report.

There's a lot about this that angers me - as you can tell. Councillors in denial, the misrepresentation in the report to the AGM, the lack of transparency and so on. But one thing really does baffle me. Dates on membership cards. A membership card is a thing - it's kind of flat, but it's physical. A person puts it in to an envelope. The membership card has a date on it, in decent sized letters. Why, why does the person putting the membership card in the envelope not look at the wretched card and see if the date makes sense?

Excuse the annoyance - but bear in mind I've been banging on about the membership system since 2005
JT
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by JT »

Simon L6 wrote:...But one thing really does baffle me. Dates on membership cards. A membership card is a thing - it's kind of flat, but it's physical. A person puts it in to an envelope. The membership card has a date on it, in decent sized letters. Why, why does the person putting the membership card in the envelope not look at the wretched card and see if the date makes sense?


As soon as you choose to outsource you lose that amount of care/responsibility. Arvato are only interested in meeting their SLA.

Arvato should be logging and categorising all calls they receive to enable them to report to CTC on how many are membership queries - CTC should insist on that. Likewise, National Office should be doing the same - even if they just refer the callers to Arvato. Also, for their complaint to be recorded as such, a caller shouldn't have to know to state to Arvato that their call is a complaint - any call that is not a new enquiry or change of details is probably a complaint of some sort.

A proper and well-publicised complaints procedure (a form on the CTC website perhaps?), would also help. How many people will trawl through this forum trying to find out the only official method that counts their complaint?

To be honest, the whole thing (including the Arvato element) comes across as a bit amateurish - like it's being run from someone's shed.
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Si
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Si »

Note: I've expanded the quote above to include the section that isn't directly forum related.

Also, as this is a thread about membership services I will include the bit about Membership Services from that page:

CTC Membership Services
In recent years, some members have expressed concern about the quality of CTC Membership services. Council has been equally concerned, and in 2008 commissioned an independent review. That review was acted upon and changes made. To ensure that the changes had led to the expected improvement in services, an update to the earlier review was commissioned earlier this year.

The findings from the reviews were considered in detail by Council’s Management Committee together with a full report from senior CTC staff. A summary of the actions taken by Council will be included in the Annual Report for the year, but in advance of the Report, details of the discussions by Management Committee, the paper forming the basis of the discussion and the two reviews are all available by clicking here.
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Simon L6
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Simon L6 »

complacency rules!
Biking Bill
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Biking Bill »

Hang on, the new posting on the complaints page from Mayne says exactly the opposite to what is being alleged here

The full complaints procedure is initiated if a member formally asks for it to be used but complaints monitoring starts at our first point of contact with a member.

We expect the vast majority of complaints to be dealt with by the person who is contacted by the member. We try to record every contact with a member on their record even if the matter is immediately resolved. Everything considered a failure of CTC service is recorded as such even if the member doesn’t complain. Therefore we are recording detail such as missing cards or magazines as complaints to get a picture of any underlying level of concern.



He then goes on to say the ones that come to him are recorded again - so that means the scores are inflated, not deflated.

And Simon - nobody has put 60,000 membership cards in envelopes by hand since the dark ages! If CTC was still doing that we really should be worried.
Karen Sutton
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Karen Sutton »

Kevin has said "Everything considered a failure of CTC service is recorded as such even if the member doesn’t complain. Therefore we are recording detail such as missing cards or magazines as complaints to get a picture of any underlying level of concern".

But these are not treated as complaints, so are not taken seriously?
I would really like to know how many of these have been recorded. In my opinion.this data should have been included in the report. As regards this thread being bad publicity for CTC, this is after all a discussion board. And we are discussing the issue.
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Si
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Si »

I would say that the thread is very bad publicity for the CTC.
However, it is on an issue that was creating a large amount complaint and controversy on many other forums as well as this one. At least with this thread it creates an opportunity for everyone to put their cards on the table, to make their points in a (hopefully) constructive and respectful manner, and for everyone to defend their opinion.

The alternative is for the issue to continue, as it would, on other forums and in other media of discussion, where the accused do not have the opportunity to defend themselves against the accusers. This, in my view, is a lot worse for the CTC because it never gives the problem a chance to be resolved.

As to whether the issue will be resolved - I don't know, but at least everyone has the opportunity to voice their view, and everyone knows that because it is on this forum they should feel able to make comment without the fear of being flamed by someone who disagrees with them.

We may have been a little more lax in moderation on the this thread than normal - but that's only because we know that those who have had the odd comment directed toward them are happy to take it as it says more about the ability of those making the comments to put over a reasoned argument than it does about their targets.

TBH, the renewals issue has been dragging on so long it's time it got brought out into an open discussion. It it could have been put right behind the scenes with the least possible todo then that would have been great, but it has proven not to be the case. (and please note, that by this I am merely stating that there is an issue, I am not saying whether it is is a procedural issue within the renewals mechanics, or whether it is just miscommunication and Chinese whispers :wink: ).
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Simon L6
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Simon L6 »

BB - we'll never know. It's taken months to get to the bottom of the money trail, and it is beyond us to audit the complaints trail. All I can say (again and again) that there is a palpable lack of transparency, even in Council meetings, as Regulator's posts make clear.

In one respect I agree entirely with Kevin. Paid staff have no business responding to complaints on the forum. They're not paid to do that. They should, as Kevin says, be getting on with the job. It is for Councillors to come on. If they don't have the information to hand, tben they can always ask. I suspect, however, that most councillors regard this matter as a minefield, especially since real data is so hard to come by.
Regulator
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Re: CTC Membership Services

Post by Regulator »

Biking Bill

The reason that recorded complaints seem to be going down is that people have given up complaining - they are simply walking away. We have a membership turnover that is almost twice that for similar organisations - that should be telling us something.

And how complaints are recorded is relevant. I've made a number of complainst about my own membership - are they recorded separately or as a single complaint? And what about complaints about National Office themselves? Where are these recorded? When you write to the Chair does the figure get added in?

I've tried getting the answers to these questions - and I can't. I'm a member of Council and I can't get answers.

That says something...
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