Customer Feedback and Customer Complaints
Our expertise has meant that we have been winning compensation for consumers from banks and building societies since 1989. Our aim has always been to win full and fair compensation for consumers as efficiently as possible and to leave no stone unturned whilst trying to achieve this aim. However, please tell us promptly if you feel that any aspect of our work for you has been or still is unsatisfactory in any way at all. We welcome customer feedback and any suggestions you may care to make as to how we can improve our services. You may help us to deal with something we might otherwise have overlooked.
Delays in winning compensation are increasing for many classes of complaint
We notify clients of the likely timescale's in which we hope to win them compensation but these can change due to circumstances beyond our control. For example in January 2007 we estimated in the light of previous experience that bank penalty charge claims would probably settle within 3-4 months. In April 2007 we told clients that 6 months was a more likely time frame. Now as a result of action by the OFT and FSA most current account penalty charge complaints are are on hold and will not now be resolved until after the High Court case.
The delays caused by the credit card companies on this special group of cases are now increasing month by month as they receive more and more new complaints. Some of our requests for information sent to the banks in January had not been answered three months later. And the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) now has very large numbers of complaints so inevitably their response times are likely to slow down a little. We have taken some penalty charge claims to court but county courts also experience backlogs of cases. At least six months can pass between the issuance of a claim form and a hearing date in court. So please bear in mind that delays in winning you money for such cases are not usually of our making.
Delays can be much longer in other classes of complaint unrelated to bank charges. For example, CLAIMS is a specialist in investigating claims for compensation from Windsor Life regarding policies sold in the period 1987-1995 by agents of General Portfolio a company which was later renamed GAN and joined the group of dead companies labeled Windsor Life in 1998. Several of these complaints have taken three, four or even more years to settle and in a recent case an Ombudsman awarded our client's costs against the firm for its failure to calculate loss accurately over a period of five years.
Customer Complaints
When the Department of Constitutional Affairs (DCA) was preparing its rules for regulating the industry in 2006 CLAIMS lobbied hard to ensure that its rules would be very strict in order to drive ‘cowboy firms' out of the complaint handling business. This is because, as indicated above, CLAIMS has been fighting for consumer justice since 1989 and we did not wish to see the reputation we have built up over nearly two decades tarnished by the behaviour of other firms in the sector. We were glad that the DCA, now called the Ministry of Justice, agreed with our proposals and has laid down complaint-handling rules for firms like ours matching those that life companies, banks and FSA registered firms have to abide by.
As a regulated business we offer a formal complaints procedure with strict timetables and rules. This follows the exact requirements of the DCA rules published on 14 th December 2006. They are available on its website: www.claimsregulation.gov.uk if you wish to read them.
1. If you wish to lodge a formal complaint in respect of any claims management service we have provided for you that is regulated under the Compensation Act 2006 please either call or write to the senior partner, Paul Cooper, who will acknowledge your complaint within five business days of receiving it and send you a response within four weeks.
2. It is hoped that our response will be a final response addressing your complaint in full, but if we are not in a position to resolve it, possibly because we have not received information from yourself or some other third party, we will write to you again after eight weeks. This eight-week letter will either be a final response or if we are still awaiting information will explain the delay and notify you when we expect to send you a final response to your complaint.
3. Our letter will also inform you that if you are dissatisfied with the delay, or indeed the final response, you may refer our handling of the complaint to the Claims Management Regulator at P O Box 7824 Burton on Trent Staffordshire DE14 9DP info@claimsregulation.gov.uk Tel. 0845 4506858. The regulator's job is merely to ensure that our handling of your complaint has been correct and in accordance with the rules.