It used to be said that an employer got the Trade Unions it deserved, and it occurs to me, following similar logic, that financial services companies have got the regulators they deserve..
The old Life companies never quite embraced the idea that the customer deserved special consideration just because, and only because, he or she was a customer. They were awful at handling complaints, and lots of people complained about the way their complaints were handled.
Enter the regulator. Now there has to be a complaints procedure. Complaints have to be answered in a standard time. Everything has to be counted, and open to inspection by the Treating Customers Fairly police. Guess what: whereas before you got treated with thinly disguised contempt, today the financial services company may well dispense with the thin disguise.
You write to complain. You get a letter to acknowledge your complaint. This a quote from a letter from AXA: "I would expect the investigation to take a minimum of 20 working days, following which you will receive our final decision. Should the investigation take longer than 20 working days then you will receive an update on the situation." Eh? I think this means that I shouldn’t expect to hear anything for at least a month, and the most likely thing to arrive next is another letter telling me that I’ll have to wait even longer for an answer.
In this case it took ten weeks, not 20 days, to get another letter that still didn’t answer the question that had been put in the first place. The final straw, which I’ve also had from Aviva, was the imperious "I am able to provide you with our final decision". Excuse me, honeybunch: you supplier, me customer, me is king and king decides when complaint is settled.
A manager with one ounce of sense and two of authority could settle most complaints with a quick ‘phone call. But common sense isn’t in the regulator’s book. And financial services companies serve their new master – the regulator – even if it means treating their customers just as badly, sometimes even worse, than they treated them before.
And that, dear reader, is called progress.
Read this article at http://www.candidmoney.com/articles/article95.aspx
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