Complaints Assistant investigates a resident’s complaint against your housing association’s own indexed policies and produces a draft response, ready for a Complaints Officer to review before it’s issued.
There’s nothing to set up. Paste a complaint into your first message and it goes straight into the analysis, no confirmation step first.
Before you start
- You need an actual complaint — uploaded or pasted. Nothing happens without one. Include it in your first message and Complaints Assistant goes straight into the analysis; ask for help without one and it asks for the complaint and waits for your reply.
- Your policies need to already be in your indexed documents. Complaints Policy, Repairs Policy, Tenancy Policy, Anti-Social Behaviour Policy, Customer Service Standards, Compensation Policy, equality or vulnerability policies, and Housing Ombudsman guidance are all sources it searches. If a policy isn’t there, it can’t use it — it says so rather than guessing.
- Have supporting details ready if you have them. Dates, tenancy details, repair reference numbers, the complaint stage, previous correspondence, investigation findings, staff actions, photographs or inspection reports. It will ask for anything missing before finishing, so having these to hand avoids a back-and-forth.
- Supported file types: PDF, TXT, CSV, MD, DOCX, DOC, XLS and XLSX. XLS and XLSX are read worksheet by worksheet, not just the first sheet. Scanned pages and handwriting are readable too, via optical character recognition. Files stay in your browser rather than being sent anywhere, so there’s no fixed size limit beyond what your device can handle.
How it works
It skips the preamble when you’ve already given it something to work with. Paste the complaint straight into your first message and it goes directly into the analysis — no confirmation round trip, no restating the workflow back to you. Only when you ask for help without a complaint does it pause to explain what it will do and wait for you to provide one.
The internal assessment and the resident-facing reply are written to sound like two different people. The Policy Assessment section names and quotes policy freely. The Draft Complaint Response names a policy by title once at most and leads every paragraph with the issue or the action, never the policy. This is deliberate — one is written for an internal reviewer, the other for the resident, and they’re not meant to read the same way.
It stops and asks rather than filling in the blanks. Missing a date, a reference number, a photograph? It asks for it rather than drafting around the gap. A guessed fact in a live complaint response is worse than a question.
Try it now
The quickest way to see what Complaints Assistant does is to give it a real complaint straight away.
- Open Complaints Assistant.
- Paste or upload a real complaint — anonymised is fine for a first look — straight into your first message.
- Read the five sections that come back.
You will know it worked when the Draft Complaint Response reads like something a person wrote to a resident, not a summary of a policy document.
The workflow
Draft a complaint response
Use it when: a resident complaint has landed and needs investigating against policy, with a draft response ready for review.
You get: five sections in order — Complaint Summary, Relevant Policies, Policy Assessment (written for an internal reviewer), Draft Complaint Response (written for the resident, in a deliberately different voice), and Additional Information Required.
Note: paste the complaint into your first message and it goes straight into the analysis; ask for help without one and it asks for the complaint and waits. Either way, nothing is generated until it actually has one to work from.
Walkthrough: from complaint to reviewed draft
- Paste or upload the complaint, including anything you already have. Dates, reference numbers, prior correspondence — the more it has upfront, the fewer follow-up questions.
- Read the Policy Assessment before the draft. It sets out which policies apply and what may have been missed — the internal view your Complaints Officer needs first.
- Check the Draft Complaint Response against the assessment. It’s written in the resident’s voice by design, so confirm it makes the same points, not fewer.
- Supply anything listed under Additional Information Required. Reply with the missing detail and it will revise the draft.
- Route it through a Complaints Officer before it’s sent. That check is down to your process, not a safeguard built into the platform.
Getting better results
- Include supporting detail upfront — dates, reference numbers, correspondence — rather than waiting to be asked. It cuts the back-and-forth.
- Read the Policy Assessment and the Draft Response together, not just the draft. The assessment is where you check nothing was missed.
- Treat “insufficient information” as an honest answer, not a stall. If a policy area should have been covered and wasn’t, tell us — that’s the fastest way to tell whether the gap is in your indexed documents or the assistant’s instructions.
- Never skip the Complaints Officer review step, and escalate safeguarding or urgent items the moment you see them flagged in the Complaint Summary. Neither is enforced by the platform — both are down to your process.
What it will not do
- Generate anything until an actual complaint has been provided.
- Admit liability unless it’s clearly supported by the available information.
- Promise an action that policy doesn’t support.
- Invent a policy, procedure or fact, or assume something happened beyond what you’ve stated or your indexed documents support.
- Prevent a draft being sent unreviewed. It produces a draft for a Complaints Officer to check — that review is a step in your process, not something the platform enforces.
Common questions
I asked for help and it just asked me to paste the complaint — is that right?
Yes. Without a complaint in your message, it explains what it will do and waits, rather than guessing at content it doesn’t have.
Why does the Draft Complaint Response barely mention policy, when the Policy Assessment above it is full of citations?
By design. The assessment is for an internal reviewer; the draft is for the resident, and reads as a person addressing them, not a policy summary.
It’s asking for a reference number I don’t have yet — can it proceed without it?
No, not for anything it’s flagged as missing. It asks rather than drafting around a gap.
Can I send the Draft Complaint Response straight to the resident?
It’s written to be reviewed first. Nothing in the platform stops you sending it unreviewed, but it’s produced as a draft for a Complaints Officer to check, not a finished letter.
It said there’s insufficient information in our indexed documents — does that mean the policy doesn’t exist?
Not necessarily. It means the assistant couldn’t find enough to answer that part with confidence, and is telling you honestly rather than guessing.
Next steps
Try it on a real complaint your team already knows well, so you can judge the draft against what a Complaints Officer would actually send — and route every draft through review before anything goes to a resident.