We are committed to providing an excellent service to all our clients and believe that everyone has a right to be heard, understood, and respected. We also believe that our team have the right to work in a safe environment and expect our visitors to always treat our people with courtesy, consideration, and respect. This applies to all means of communications, such as verbal, in person and written.

We wish that our team are comfortable in doing their jobs and they are encouraged to make individual assessments about situations that may arise where they feel uncomfortable.

Our policy enables us to deal with unacceptable client behaviour professionally and consistently. We have provided some examples below of behavior or actions that may be considered unacceptable:

Aggressive or abusive behaviour

This consists of behaviour (written or verbal) that may cause our team to feel intimidated, offended, bullied, or harassed:

• Threatening language, emails and telephone calls.

• Inappropriate comments on social media.

• Inappropriate banter, including innuendo, jokes or stories.

• Malicious allegations.

• Any form of physical violence or threats of physical violence.

• Derogatory, racial, sexist, ageist, or homophobic remarks.

• Comments relating to disability, perceived gender, religion, belief or any other protected characteristic.

Unreasonable demands and vexatious complains:

What amounts to unreasonable client demands will depend on the circumstances of the complaint and the seriousness of the issues raised. Some factors may include:

• Amount of information sought.

• Nature and scale of service expected.

• Volume of correspondence generated.

• Time or resources consumed.

We accept that persistence is not necessarily a form of unacceptable behaviour. Examples of behaviour that would fall within unreasonable demands and vexatious complaints include but are not limited to:

• Refusing to follow a reasonable process in relation complaints.

• Insisting on seeing or speaking to a particular member of the team when a suitable alternative has been offered.

Our Procedures

No member of our team should tolerate unacceptable or vexatious behaviour when communicating with clients. When this occurs, they have the right to:

• End the phone call.

• Not reply to an abusive email or letter.

• Ask you to leave the practice.

It is reasonable to expect that you are warned that your conduct is considered to be offensive to allow you the opportunity to moderate your behaviour. Where these circumstances arise, we may take the following steps:

• We will ask you to modify your behaviour and explain why.

• If the behaviour continues the member of staff will remove themselves for the situation.

• If the communication is by telephone/video call you will be informed the call will be terminated.

• The incident may be formally documented.

• The incident or situation will investigated and further action may be determined. This action may include the termination of your service.

• We will refer the matter to the police where we consider a criminal offence might have been threatened or committed.

Client Conduct Policy Complaints and Enquiries

If you have any queries or complaints about our Client Conduct Policy please contact us via phone, email or in person to discuss this further. You can view or download a copy of our complaints and feedback process here.