How can I send my feedback to the British Council?
- Online using our online form
- By e-mail at contact@britishcouncil.ro
- By phone: +40 (0)21 307 96 00 (Monday – Friday, from 0900 to 1700)
- By post: British Council Customer Services, 14 Calea Dorobanţilor; Bucharest 010572
- In person at the British Council, Customer Services
We value your opinion
We hope to make your experience of dealing with the British Council an excellent one and we welcome your comments, suggestions and details of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This could be about the service you have experienced when contacting us, or when using any of our products or services. We would also like to hear from you if a particular member of staff has provided exceptional service.
What we will do
All customers are dealt with seriously and impartially and are responded to promptly, regardless of the subject matter. We aim to respond to your comment or suggestion within 48 hours. Comments or suggestions that are more complex may take longer to deal with. In these cases we will keep you updated on the progress.
We will draw upon information received from your comments and suggestions in order to improve our products and services.
The information you provide will be kept according to the Data Protection Legislation which has been in force since 1998 in England. The data you will supply will be used to help us improve our services. We will only use your contact details, if you choose to provide them, to respond to your comment. We will not pass your contact details to a third party.
Our customer service team provides information and guidance about the British Council and its programmes and activities.
There is no charge for contacting the customer service team, but some of the British Council products and services that we provide information about or recommend to you have a cost involved.
How to make a complaint
If you wish to make a complaint, you can do so by email, letter or telephone, however we encourage you to make your complaint in writing wherever possible. All complaints should be made within 90 days of the date that the event occurred, or the date that the issue came to your attention.
In Romania
Contact the British Council Customer Service team in your local office.
Please note that we can only discuss personal information and deal with complaints from the customer, for example, one of our exams candidates or the confirmed representative from an organisation involved in a British Council programme.
You may wish to have a third party act on your behalf, which could be another person or organisation. Third parties may include advice organisations; professionals such as solicitors or teaching professionals, or family members and friends. Where this is the case, you will need to provide written consent to that effect. More information surrounding this can be obtained when you talk to us about your complaint.
Handling Your Complaint
We aim to resolve as many issues as we can the very first time you contact us. The member of staff you talk to will aim to see it through to resolution wherever possible, but he or she may need to liaise with other colleagues to make this happen.
In some cases, you may receive your response from the person or department responsible for that aspect of our work. In the infrequent cases where your complaint is of a serious nature, if you remain dissatisfied with our conclusion the matter may be escalated to a higher level. More detail surrounding this will be provided when we handle your complaint.
Remedies
The general principle we follow is that complainants should, so far as possible, be put in the position they would have been in had things not gone wrong. Our aim is to provide practical remedies wherever possible. When we get things wrong, we aim to: Sincerely apologise and take responsibility. Acknowledge and explain what went wrong and why. Endeavour to put things right without delay. Learn lessons from your complaint to improve our services.
Confidentiality
Your complaint will be dealt with in the strictest confidence, in line with our Global Information Security and Privacy policy. Information about you will be shared internally, only as necessary to investigate and resolve your complaint. We will only disclose your information to third parties with your consent, or if we are legally required to do so. Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold on you, and the right to ask us to correct any inaccuracies in that information.
For further information on this please contact us or see our website.
External Review
If your complaint is of a particularly serious nature and has reached our highest internal level, when responding to you we will provide information on how to have your case assessed for investigation by our independent review body, should you remain dissatisfied.
Accessibility
If we are unable to answer your question directly, then we will guide you to someone in the organisation who can. If you have a specific enquiry but do not know who to speak to, we can put you in contact with the right person or team. Our staff are trained in the use of plain English, and we aim to make the information we provide as clear as possible. We are also able to provide information in special formats, such as Braille, if this is needed.