DELIVERY DISASTERS
EVERY year, Resolver releases a report on the number of complaints made in the last year.
More than two million complaints were made using the website between April 2019 and March 2020 – an all-time record. What’s even more surprising is the fact that though 1.1 million of them were about PPI (remember that?!) another 1 million complaints were about other things.
People can ask Resolver to help sort out complaints about more than 100 different products and services. But the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming.
Here Resolver’s chief executive, Alex Neill, takes us through the stats.
TRAVEL TRAUMAS
EVEN though Resolver’s data only covers the first month of lockdown, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on complaints. If you had a holiday booked this year, then it won’t come as a surprise to you to find out that holiday and flight complaints have gone through the roof.
By far the biggest problem is getting refunds out of airlines and travel companies, with people reporting particular problems with online travel and holiday companies. If you’re worried about upcoming holidays, get in touch.
CLASSIC COMPLAINTS
SOME long-standing problems are still leading people to make complaints, with payday loan disputes up 220%, while 31,000 people complained about packaged bank accounts. Problems with these products have been around for years, but the fact that numbers are still this high means many people only recently realised they had a right to complain.
CREDIT GETS A MAKEOVER
helped sort out over 9,000 complaints about ‘buy now, pay later’ credit. This kind of lending used to be either catalogue-style credit or ‘pay no interest for a year’ deals.
Store credit has a bad rep. The interest you can end up paying is often huge and it was easy to get into debt. While interest and charges have been reduced significantly since the regulator introduced new rules, big problems remain.
COMPLAINTS about parcel delivery are up a whopping 155% to 90,000 cases last year. Add in complaints made direct to the shops and those numbers go over 200,000. People complain about delivery failures in jaw-dropping numbers every week. You have loads of rights in this area, but in short: the shop you bought the goods from is responsible for making sure the items are in your hands.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
IF there’s been one abiding theme over the last year it’s that people are increasingly angry about poor customer service and how many businesses are making it next to impossible to contact them. Well over half of all complaints mention customer service or contact problems.
Chief among the bones of contention are online forms and ‘non-response’ emails, rubbish chatbots and telephone numbers that you can’t find or get through on. We’re working with businesses and regulators to tackle this problem head on.
Watch this space.
■ For many people, making a complaint can often seem like hard work. But it doesn’t have to be. Want to see what people complained about last year or to get help with a business or complaint? Get free help from resolver.co.uk