Managing customer complaints

The Financial Services Ombudsman service has announced today that Lloyds Banking Group has received the most complaints this year, with a collossal 15,233 complaints of which 82% were upheld. That's pushing half of the 38,286 complaints the five biggest banking groups received between them.

Behind Lloyds, Barclays received 9,056 complaints; Royal Bank of Scotland 5,883; Abbey - which includes Abbey National and Alliance & Leicester - 4,279 and HSBC 2,969.

Barclays Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland both had 71 per cent of customer complaints upheld, while Abbey National had 67 per cent and Bank of Scotland 52 per cent.

Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Financial Ombudsman Service, said: “I will now be writing to the chairmen of the financial businesses that generate the largest proportion of our complaints workload, to ask them to consider very carefully both their own complaints performance – and the complaints performance of their competitors.”

Complaints have to have failed to reach resolution before they can be referred to the FOS so the true numbers of complaints will be much higher in each instance.

Financial services marketers don't always have access to information about complaints, but we should - this kind of publicity is likely to influence prospective customers. As I wrote in my previous post, since the advent of social networking, each disgruntled customer could easily be telling 120 people of their bad experience. You only have to read the comments on the article to see how keen people are to share problems.

As marketers, we should be ensuring we are aware of our organisations' complaint levels and ensuring that any patterns are identified and rectified quickly. We have to know that our marketing campaigns aren't going to be putting more pressure onto lower performing areas of the business and that customers are getting the experience we promise them.