If the regulator snapped its fingers and demanded to know how many complaints we had received upon account closure after a sale, it was there. One click of a finger and that information would be piped onto the desk of our visiting FSA overlord in a curling, steaming data stream.
The one drawback of this database, (well I say one) was that they punished and reprimanded everyone for not logging any potential complaint. So basically every complaint got logged.
A customer woke up with a sore toe. That got looked into. A customer didn’t like Shania Twain and wanted more GaGa on the holding music. That got looked into. A customer complained because he had rung a wrong number etc etc etc.
The one drawback of this database (well I didn’t say there was just one. Or did I?) was that there are 14,987 categories of complaint. Prof Hawking would be hard pressed to break the code of how to log a complaint correctly.
As a result, our complaints team spent the majority of its time telling people off and showing them how to log a complaint in 27 easy steps over 68 minutes. Or else they tried to wade through a 10 year backlog of complaints. This has all changed.
We have now been expressly told to log only complaints that count. We have to check to see if someone is a serial whinger. Check to see if they are an unhinged complainer; please see Mrs Malone in earlier blogs. We can now only register complaints where we have actually done something.
People then check up on your complaints logging. It all sounds Little Brother-ish to me. But it’s a step in the right direction.
