User Engagement Policy

Information Services (IS) welcomes and actively seeks feedback from our users. We employ a variety of formal and informal mechanisms for maintaining dialogue, eliciting feedback and ensuring that our services are responsive to user demand and changing user needs.

How to contact us / give feedback

IS Response to feedback

Responses to our annual user surveys, focus groups and other activities are made available on our  feedback webpages. Additional feedback on Information Services is received via the annual National Student Survey and other University-wide feedback mechanisms. This data is used along with other feedback mechanisms to regularly review and develop our services.

User engagement

User Survey: IS conducts an extensive User Survey every November covering all services and provides comparative data that we use to identify trends and plan our services. A gap analysis identifies the biggest gaps between “importance” and “satisfaction” and this information is used to target services and facilities that are shown to be less successful. IS staff analyse the findings of the user survey to prioritise areas for improvement.

Student Focus Groups are held to get more in-depth feedback from our customers on our services, facilities, or potential changes.

Staff Student Consultative Committees, Research Student Consultative Committees and Faculty Academic Affairs Committees: The purpose of the SSCCs and RSCC is to establish a formal means of discussion and communication between departments and students on matters relating to academic issues affecting their studies. IS staff attend SSCCs, RSCC and FAACs, and report back on any issues involving IS and report back to the departments on actions taken where appropriate.

Sample weeks are held 3 times a year during November, March and May. The aims of sample weeks are to:

    • Record categorised enquiries – review categories in advance
    • Plan and carry out activities to gather feedback on selected IS activities and services

The themes will vary from one sample week to the next depending on which services or user groups we wish to investigate or prioritise. However every year we will collect general qualitative feedback from users on our services to get an overview of how our services are doing.

Engagement with the Students' Union

Information Services holds regular meetings with the Aberystwyth Students' Union Academic Affairs Officer. This is an opportunity for the Academic Affairs Officer to raise any issues that have been reported to her/him, and also an opportunity for IS to report on any changes or improvements to the service.

IS also conducts more informal user engagement exercises, including holding regular meetings with Support Service colleagues and other partners in the university to discuss issues and agree any actions required to improve access to IS facilities and services for students and staff.

Complaints Procedure

In Information Services we are committed to providing you with excellent service, and we invite your feedback to help us to improve what we do. We recognise, however, that sometimes we may not provide the level of service that you expect. If you would like to take up any matter you think is unsatisfactory about the service you have received from us, please refer to our Complaints Procedure.We promise that we will deal with your complaint as quickly as possible, in confidence, keep you updated, and look at the pattern of complaints to identify areas where we need to improve.

This Policy is maintained by Information Services, was last reviewed in October 2022 and is due for review in October 2024.