Complaints made complicated

Complaining should be simple, so why does the Financial Services Authority seem intent on making it more complicated?.

There is nothing quite like the Financial Services Authority website for a good belly laugh. One of the latest outpourings is an absurdly complicated paper with associated appendices all about how a firm should and should not handle complaints.

There follows, for the benefit of the FSA, a simple guide to what we consumers actually want.

If we have a complaint, we want to be able to address it to a person, a human being. We want that person to respond. At its simplest, a letter to acknowledge the complaint. We want that person to commit to doing something. Promising to pass the complaint onto someone else doesn’t count. We want that person to get on and fix it, and we want them to remember to tell us that they’ve fixed it. The quicker all this happens, the happier we are.

The regulator, of course, wants a separate department and a mass of statistics, with standard times and heaven alone knows what, to bureaucratise a process which, at its simplest, involves two human beings trying to sort something out. Who pays for this farce? We do, of course.

A good few years ago an old pal of mine, recovering from a heart attack, went out to Hong Kong for the Sevens. He had an awful flight back with Virgin, and wrote to complain. He got a ‘phone call the day after he posted the letter. The caller was Richard Branson, with an apology and an offer of a flight to New York. You can’t legislate for that.

On an entirely different note it appears that the deputy governor of the Bank of England thinks that those of us who have savings should draw them out and spend the money to keep the economy going (I’ve been away so missed the exact quote). His name is Mr Bean. Quite. When we savers want his opinion we’ll give it to him.

Read this article at http://www.candidmoney.com/articles/article156.aspx