You can measure a company's management skills by its willingness to seek out useful feedback and respond to it in a creative way - When confronted with feedback, the most successful people become curious, not defensive. They appreciate the message and the messenger, and they look for ways to improve

Forbes

Users and potential users of the regulated services must be the ultimate arbiters of what is right. Not via some lip service to consultation, some tokenistic engagement, but through a real shift of power, to counterbalance the relative powerlessness of the individual user.

Bryan Heiser – Board member NCSC. Community Care article June 2003.

Some councils have failed to grasp that the CSCI scoring system is weighted towards choice, voice and independence of service users.

Paul Snell - Guardian - Dec 2006

23.  - (1) the registered person shall introduce and maintain a system for reviewing at appropriate intervals the quality of the service and personal care which the agency arranges to be provided
(2) the registered person shall supply to the appropriate office of the national assembly a report in respect of any review conducted by him or her for the purposes of paragraph (1) and shall make a copy of the report available to service users
(3) the system referred to in paragraph (1) shall provide for consultation with service users and their representatives.

Domiciliary Care Regulations

We agree with many of the criticisms that have been made about the present arrangements. The weakness is that the current regulatory and inspection system pays insufficient attention to what people want from their services, and doesn't provide us with a sufficiently comprehensive view of how people are experiencing them.

Dame Denise Platt DBE, 26 October 2004 - National Care Homes Association Annual Conference - Independence and choice: the challenge for care home providers and the role of inspection and regulation

Consulting stakeholders

Underlying any adequate approach to self-assessment is the need to ascertain, and act on, the views of stakeholders. Inspectors will look for clear evidence, therefore, that schools have collected and acted upon the views of parents and pupils and have a sense of their contribution to the community and liaise appropriately with external bodies.

New inspections and the viewpoint of users - Ofsted report - 18 October 2004

Marks and Spencer's customer satisfaction ratings started to decline 3 years before its profits and share price plummeted. This emerged in a BBC2 Money Programme earlier this year to which a disgruntled employee of M&S leaked the findings of a MORI research report.

MORI poll

At the heart of Charter Mark criteria is the fundamental question: what does the customer expect or hope for from the services you offer? None of us can be sure how we are performing without consultation and feedback from users. Charter Mark demands that we listen, act and deliver.

Charter Mark

Power relations: there can be differences in power and influence between service users and social care professionals which make it hard for service users to be listened to seriously. Things are not always structured so that service users feel that they can make a difference.

Has service user participation made a difference to social care services? (SCIE)

Top executives at multinational companies consider non-financial performance measures such as product and service quality and customer satisfaction and loyalty more important than current financial results in creating long-term shareholder value, according to a Management Barometer survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

PricewaterhouseCoopers

There is very little collective discussion of course content. Consultation on programme planning or evaluation seems occasional at best. The people we talked to had remarkably little experience of formal student representation, unless they were in FE colleges, in which case they were likely to feel the system didn't work for them

Listening to Learners - Scottish Executive

Launching the report Graham Williams said: "The report highlights the continuing need for improvement in a number of key areas:

* service users and carers must be listened to on a more constant basis

* the workforce must be engaged in contributing evidence to inform the authority’s decision making

Social Services Inspectorate - Press release December 2004

"We should ensure every local service uses customer surveys to score how well services are responding to consumer demands," says Milburn. "Over time, we could go further. Users' views about performance could form a growing proportion of the scores given to local services in the league tables and performance measures published by central government. Local communities could have new rights to challenge, or even remove, services that are consistently poorly performing."

Alan Milburn - Wednesday January 12, 2005 The Guardian

The inspectorate would listen more to complaints from care home residents and whistleblowers. It would spend less time on routine inspections and more on listening to service users. In that way, it could find out what needed regulating and what information people needed to make choices.

Dame Denise Platt - Guardian article 18th May 2005

…the point of forming a partnership is to improve performance, and this should principally be measured through the eyes of service-users, citizens and other stakeholders.

Audit Commission Report - A fruitful partnership