Consumer Complaint First Steps: Response, Analysis, and Resolution
It doesn’t feel great to lodge a complaint. Righteous indignation only lasts so long until you’re left with discomfort, embarrassment, and second-guesses: Am I being oversensitive? What will I say if someone questions my feedback?
These feelings may explain the fact that for every individual who makes a formal complaint against a company, 26 other customers who have had a similar experience simply walk away and take their money elsewhere. And sure, some people complain just to vent, but when most of us cause a fuss, we do so in order to compel someone to take action—because complaining is such an unpleasant process.
For consumer finance companies, every complaint represents an important and imperative opportunity to do better. Consumers generally don’t want to deliver negative feedback; lenders don’t want to receive it; and, in the agency’s signature way, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeks to help. To this end, the CFPB has issued guidance on effective complaint management programs for finance companies, breaking those programs into 5 key areas.
Last week, we explored the CFPB’s guidance on consumer complaint intake and escalation. This week, we’re going to pick apart Fair Lending guidelines for compliance programs’ response, analysis, and resolution processes. Play along at home with the checklist below:
CFPB Guidance on Consumer Complaint Response
The CFPB’s objectives: Complaints and inquiries, whether regarding the entity or its service providers, are addressed and resolved promptly.
Compliance Questions to Ask
- Are you tracking resolution dates to analyze how long complaints are taking to resolve?
- Are you recording resolution type and summary for later analysis?
- Are you periodically reviewing your service providers’ complaint response procedures?
CFPB Guidance on Consumer Complaint Analysis
The CFPB’s objectives: Organizations use complaint data and individual cases to drive adjustments to business practices as appropriate.
Compliance Questions to Ask
- Can you easily access reports that show complaint volume, type and source?
- Can you access reports that show how long complaints are taking to resolve, along with how long they spend within each stage of your resolution process?
- From these reports, can you identify trends—types of complaints you’re receiving frequently, or stages of the resolution process that are taking longer than expected?
CFPB Guidance on Consumer Complaint Resolution
The CFPB’s objectives: Consumer complaints result in retrospective corrective action to correct the e ects of the supervised entity’s actions when appropriate.
Compliance Questions to Ask
- Based on the trends you’ve discovered from your reporting, have you developed corrective action plans?
- Based on your analysis, do your procedures need to be updated?
- Are there topics you workforce needs additional training on, based on complaint trends?
- Do you need to make modi cations to your products to minimize consumer complaints?
The Next Step
Now, combine your answers with your responses from Part 1. More “yes” answers may indicate your consumer complaint program is in great shape; more “no’s” mean more room for improvement.
Whatever answers you gave, it’s time to consider adopting a better solution for consumer complaints by automating your compliance program. Compligo helps finance companies like yours stay in compliance with Fair Lending regulations, and stay out of both regulators’ and auditors’ crosshairs. Our cloud-based system is easy-to-use and mobile-enabled.
Compligo provides a turnkey way to
- Manage your Fair Lending compliance program
- Track consumer complaints
- Monitor and report on all activities
Compligo supports your existing procedures and policies to manage consumer complaints. The platform helps you organize and retain the resulting findings so you can analyze results and make require changes in products, procedures, or training—all so you remain audit-ready to CFPB examiners, your bank’s compliance team, and your internal stakeholders.
Ready to learn more? Get in touch with us to schedule a demo.
