| Our teams and services
Our teams
EWON comprises four teams who work under the leadership of the Ombudsman:
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Investigations: The Investigations team is made up of specialist staff who handle complaints of varying complexity. They aim to assist customers and their providers to resolve problems as quickly as possible.
Investigations Officers undertake a range of actions to resolve customer complaints, including comprehensive research, review of relevant legislative provisions, site visits and referral to independent experts for advice. In reaching an outcome, they consider the law, best practice principles, and what is fair and reasonable given the circumstances of the individual case.
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Community and Service Development: The Community and Service Development team promotes and raises awareness of EWON's services, manages member and stakeholder relationships, coordinates internal and external reporting functions, organises learning and development for staff and provides other essential resources for the Investigations team.
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Policy and Research: The Policy and Research team helps to identify and address systemic issues that arise from our investigations. They provide research and analysis support to the Investigations team, and through reports and submissions they inform stakeholders and the community about the issues customers are raising with EWON.
- Corporate Services: The Corporate Services team provides essential administrative, information technology and human resources support for the organisation.
Our services
Service improvement
EWON plans its activities and measures its success against six industry-standard benchmarks.
- 1. Accessibility
- 2. Independence
- 3. Fairness
- 4. Accountability
- 5. Efficiency
- 6. Effectiveness
We constantly look at how we can improve our services and maintain efficient processes.
Improved accessibility
Following the recommendations of our 2005 Customer Survey, staff across the organisation participated in plain English training. The training aimed to improve and standardise our communication skills to increase accessibility to our services. We also ran training in working with interpreters.
Our communications strategy focused on increasing awareness of EWON in culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Consequently we increased our SBS Radio promotional campaign to cover 17 languages. We also extended our range of translated material to service 23 community languages.
One indicator of our success in improving accessibility for CALD customers is the 33% increase in our use of interpreters (235 calls this year, up from 176 calls last year).
Internal review
EWON applies the principles of procedural fairness in our decision-making. We provide opportunities for all parties to have input into an investigation and we explain the reasons for our decisions in writing.
If customers are not satisfied with an outcome, we offer to review our decision if they provide relevant new information or if they can indicate an error in our investigation report. This year we received two formal requests for internal review from a total of 3056 investigations.
2007 Customer Survey
EWON commissions biennial customer surveys to help measure our performance and ensure that we are achieving best practice results against the six-industry standard benchmarks.
The results of our 2007 Customer Survey reflect the importance EWON places on providing high quality services:
- 97% of customers were satisfied with the courtesy and helpfulness of EWON staff
- 94% of customers were satisfied with the effort EWON staff made to understand their complaint
- 92% said that their complaint was handled fairly and impartially
The results show positive change in areas identified for improvement in our previous survey. Of the customers surveyed:
- 10% felt we did not always follow through (down from 21%)
- 17% were confused about what we could and could not do (down from 27%)
- 21% said it was difficult to find out about EWON (down from 30%)
Statistics
| Outcome of investigations |
| Negotiated/facilitated resolution |
78% |
No further investigation (insufficient grounds, no further contact
from customer) |
22% |
| Binding decision (determination) |
<1% |
| Time taken to resolve disputes |
0-2 days |
3-14 days |
15-30 days |
31-90 days |
91-180 days |
> 180 days |
60% |
21% |
5% |
8% |
4% |
2% |
|
