How to Log Public Complaints About Council Buildings in One Place

A public building has no single front door for complaints. The same broken hand dryer can
arrive at the counter, in a phone call, as a comment under a social media post, and as a
forwarded message from an elected member — sometimes all four, from four different people, in
the same week.

Each channel is owned by a different team, and each team reasonably assumes someone else has it.
That is how a two-minute repair survives for a month.

The fix is not to close channels. A public body cannot tell residents to stop phoning. The fix
is to make every channel drain into the same place.

One log, many doors

Draw the distinction clearly, because it is the whole design: how a complaint arrives and
where it is recorded are separate decisions. You keep every door open. You allow exactly one
log.

Whoever receives a complaint copies it into the log. That is the entire obligation on front-line
staff — not to fix it, not to judge it, not to route it. Copy it in.

Anything more than that will not survive a busy counter.

Record the channel as a field

Keep the arrival channel as a column: counter, phone, social, email, councillor, inspection.

This sounds like bookkeeping and it is not. Three things come out of that column:

• You can reply the way the person expects. Someone who phoned expects a call, not a portal
  notification.
• You can see which channel is actually carrying volume, which is rarely the one the service is
  designed around.
• You can spot the same issue arriving four times, because the duplicates are visible next to
  each other instead of sitting in four inboxes.

Give every complaint a reference, immediately

A reference number is not bureaucracy. It is the only way a member of the public can ask about
something without re-describing it, and the only way two officers can be sure they are talking
about the same problem.

Generate it at the moment of logging and give it to the person there and then. A sequence with
the year in it is enough.

The reference also protects staff. "I reported this weeks ago and nothing happened" is a very
different conversation when you can find the entry, see the date, and say what happened to it.

Capture the location properly

Public estates have repeated layouts, which makes vague locations uniquely dangerous. "The
disabled toilet" means nothing in an organisation with sixteen buildings.

Require three things: the building, the floor or zone, and the specific item. If your estate has
asset numbers on plant and fixtures, use them — they remove the ambiguity entirely.

Where people report through a photo, the photo often carries the location implicitly. Keep it
attached to the entry rather than in a separate folder.

Do not triage at the point of entry

There is a strong instinct to have the receiving officer decide whether a complaint is valid,
urgent, or somebody else's problem.

Resist it. Triage at intake produces two failures: genuine issues discarded by someone without
the context to judge, and delay while a busy person works out where something belongs. Log
everything, triage afterwards, in one pass, by someone who can see the whole list.

The cost of logging something that turns out to be trivial is a line in a spreadsheet. The cost
of discarding something real is a complaint that comes back through a councillor.

Acknowledge, then be honest about time

An acknowledgement is not a commitment to fix. It is a confirmation that the message arrived and
a statement of what happens next.

Most public frustration is not about slow repairs. It is about silence, which people reasonably
read as being ignored. A short acknowledgement with a realistic expectation — including "this
will not be done quickly, and here is why" — outperforms an optimistic promise every time.

The minimum that works

A shared spreadsheet with: reference, date, channel, building, location, what, reported by, and
status. Nothing more until that is running.

It will carry a small estate indefinitely. It strains when several people need it open at once,
when you want to see everything ever reported about one building, or when the councillor
question becomes "how long are things taking?" rather than "what about this one?".

That is the point to look at something shared and structured. Systems that build the log from
messages as they arrive — the approach Laksana takes — keep the many-doors, one-log shape
without adding a form for staff to fill in, which is the part that tends not to survive contact
with a counter queue.