The smokescreen of complaint management

Having turned fifty in October, it appears that my latent cynicism has risen to new heights.  Has anyone else spotted the distinctly unhelpful way in which insurance companies handle any kind of challenge to the way they mismanage issues?

Our recent experience with Axa is a case in point.  Repeated, carefully-documented requests for information (to go to the client) on existing policies were systematically ignored, and then later on transmogrified into something completely different from what we had actually asked for.  It became quite apparent that customer services representatives were simply not reading our instructions which had been carefully crafted to be simple and explicit.  (It is quite possible that the recipient was an English Literature graduate with a specialism in fantasy fiction, and thought that their role was to deconstruct a work rich in symbolism.)

So, what do you do when the product-provider is apparently incapable of handling a straightforward request?  The temptation might be to send a letter of complaint, highlighting the issue and asking for the company to actually do the one thing you'd asked them to do.

Big mistake.  These days, the very act of expressing dissatisfaction and requesting that the insurer does its job triggers the Complaint Handling Procedure.  This means you'll never get an answer to your original question, because the whole thing will simply become absorbed into the complaint-handling process which is likely to take between four and eight weeks - if you're lucky.

Over time, I have edged towards the jaded view that the CHP is in fact an act of revenge by the product-provider.  Either the Customer Services department is incapable of helping, or (more likely) disinclined to help - receiving a complaint from a servicing intermediary is like Christmas coming early, as it provides the ideal get-out.  The matter can then simply be passed on to some unfortunate individual who, whilst existing to handle 'complaints' will, in the end, be absolutely unequal to the task of providing answers to the questions you originally asked (as that correspondence has now been lost). Whether or not the complaint is upheld, the Customer Services team don't have to look at it again for another four to eight weeks.  Bingo!

Here we have yet another example of a process which is ostensibly in place to correct mistakes, being used in practice to obstruct the delivery of valid services to the customer.

Contrast this with the actions of one of our Member firms recently.  Faced with an expression of dissatisfaction from a client in respect of one aspect of their service, they researched the matter swiftly, drew their own conclusions, arranged to meet the client and then settled the issue in an amicable and professional manner.  All done and dusted in around two weeks - even though there was little basis for the client's complaint.

There are ways and ways of handling these issues.  In our opinion, the Complaint Handling Procedure is a smokescreen for corporate disinterest.