CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
"
A BLACKLIST of “nuisance” complainers is to be created by the council, sparking fears that residents with genuine concerns will be silenced.
"
http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/council-chiefs-to-ignore-nuisance-complainers-1-3496088
Oh....
Hmm. Does FixMyStreet qualify as a third-party source?
Best quote, IMO (from Cllr Gavin Corbett, Green member for Fountainbridge-Craiglockhart):
“the council needs to recognise that it has a recent history of spectacular service failures"
He's right. The council needs to provide a decent level of service to people with problems - i.e. actually solving the problems in a timely manner - before it starts pointing the finger at complainers.
In my previous building my next door neighbours had spent years (at least 5) trying to get the council to replace missing spokes in the tenement bannister.
These gaps were big enough for a child to fall through and were all the way up to the 3rd floor.
We changed that headline at Peter's yard to
Council chiefs' underlings to ignore nuisance complainers again
Or more succinctly
Council chiefs' underlings to continue to ignore nuisance complainers
Though I should stop writing EEN headlines as one I did as a laugh has appeared as a quote in a more obscure publication. True.
A serious point is of course where the tipping point is established between legitimate critical feedback and abusive callers.
All organisations these days have systems for dealing with frequently argumentative customers. The widespread availability of free landlines whilst you can still monitor incoming calls on your mobile must have increased this.
The missing railing is a bad one of course. And one person's nuisance caller might be another person's whistleblower?
My brief visits to housing benefit etc left me with the view that if you needed the council to react quickly it was a good strategy to arrive at office with large dog or if these were forbidden somehow by security a crying baby?
I once spent an interesting week in our Company's London office, where the only spare desk was amongst the Exec Complaints Dept.
Some of the responses were "...we're very sorry, let us fix it and make it up to you..." but most were more like "... that is your view, our view is ... There is nothing more we can do for you..."
My takeaway from the week was that there had to be an end of the road for persistent people with unfounded complaints, and this was it and it was a tough job to handle these people politely and professionally.
I should say that my company has the policy of dealing with complaints at a local level as best we can, so this department just for the small number that got escalated.
The key question for CEC is that they use this appropriately - and not against me ;)
Hmm. Does FixMyStreet qualify as a third-party source?
I already have the evidence that 90% of my FixMyStreet submissions get ignored.
(I class them as ignored once fault reports are over a year old).
The danger with having an official process for ignoring a certain set of persons/complaints, is that once you have a process for something, it becomes far too easy to add to the list...
It never would have occurred to me that the council would be responsible for replacing missing spokes in the tenement bannister; surely it's up to the owners to sort out?
the council owns various blocks that could qualify as tenements of a more modern variety. I have been in a few of them recently in the sighthill/calders/oxgangs are. though none of them had bannisters.
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