MSE News: Barclays tops FSA complaints table

Former_MSE_Guy

This is the discussion thread for the following MSE News Story:

Read the full story:
Barclays tops FSA complaints table




Update, 1.20pm: this story has been heavily edited from the Press Association article originally published at 9.30am this morning. Please see the bottom of the linked story for an explanation.

KTF

What percentage of the total number of customers do these figures represent?

exel1966

As with most official MSE articles a true representation has not been shown.
What is the ratio of complaints to customers ? I'd expect the tables would be somewhat different when that minor fact is taken into account.
Lloyds comapres well with the industry average when upheld complaints are taken into account, Santander are surprisingly good when they eventually get round to dealing wih a complaint.

opinions4u

Impossible figures to compare.

"Biggest bank has most complaints because it has more customers" is hardly a compelling headline I suppose.

What gets recorded as a complaint? Is this applied in a standard way by all providers?

It should be any expression of dissatisfaction. But the reality is that a moan about a queue in a branch might not get recorded by many (because the staff are too busy trying to shift the queue to bother filling in complaints forms).

A stronger measure is the number of complaints that reach the FOS and are then upheld. This tells you which banks fob off genuine complaints that they should have resolved.

Former_MSE_Guy

These are coming, folks.

We put up the Press Association piece first thing (which didn't contain these figures) but we are now collecting data on the % of customers these complaints represent and we are updating as they come in. For instance, Lloyds says its figure is less than 1% of complaints.

KTF wrote: »

What percentage of the total number of customers do these figures represent?

Rupert_Bear

Well I most be in the minority. I have banked with Lloyds for a long time and in all that time I have found them brilliant. However I have always kept within the terms and conditions of any product I have with them. With some customers its always someone elses fault.

dunstonh

Thanks for responding Guy. I know we give you grief at times but its nice to know you do look at the responses (even if you may not like some of them at times!)

The complaints stats in their earlier presentations just highlighted that on the whole, the more customers/clients you had, the more complaints you got.

I just looked at complaints on a smallish (in national terms) sized firm of IFAs vs the largest network. The largest network had by far the most complaints (622 opened) but only 10% were upheld. The medium sized one had 9 cases opened but 33% upheld.

Those figures show the large firm got more complaints but upheld far less which "suggests" a better standard. Yet going by number of complaints only makes them look worse.

Lokolo

Rupert_Bear wrote: »

Well I most be in the minority. I have banked with Lloyds for a long time and in all that time I have found them brilliant. However I have always kept within the terms and conditions of any product I have with them. With some customers its always someone elses fault.

I agree, even though I've only been with Lloyds for 4 years, I've never had a problem.

davidgmmafan

"Santander are surprisingly good when they eventually get round to dealing wih a complaint."

Not according to The Daily Mail/This is Money. They just bung the customers some money and apologize. The issue is why simple things have been allowed to rumble on for MONTHS. It can't be that difficult to train to staff to take ownership, and empower them to sort things out surely?

IMO people don't want compensation, they only ask for this when they've been assured it is sorted multiple times, only to be stuck repeating the same pointless process and assurances.

king100

Well im one of those that complained to Lloyds about false info on credit file. Closed credit card down, they then decided it would be funny to then put on my file 3,4,5,6, after it had been paid off and closed.

Losers, i have no time for banks

Former_MSE_Guy

No problem. And I completely agree with some of the points made on this thread.

One issue we have is that we take a lot of articles direct from the Press Association (usually, the type that are published everywhere that are not our own research) so we can concentrate on more original stuff.

PA do a fantastic job of reporting stories but they don't always fit into our style of digging deeper as, to be fair, like many forms of media, they don't have the resources as their journos are stretched.

In this case, as this was such a big story and we need to compete with other news sources to appear on Google and via other forms of media, we needed a story up first thing today, hence why we used the already-written PA article.

It then needed more time to update the story (as we were waiting for the banks to respond to our questions).

dunstonh wrote: »

Thanks for responding Guy. I know we give you grief at times but its nice to know you do look at the responses (even if you may not like some of them at times!)

The complaints stats in their earlier presentations just highlighted that on the whole, the more customers/clients you had, the more complaints you got.

I just looked at complaints on a smallish (in national terms) sized firm of IFAs vs the largest network. The largest network had by far the most complaints (622 opened) but only 10% were upheld. The medium sized one had 9 cases opened but 33% upheld.

Those figures show the large firm got more complaints but upheld far less which "suggests" a better standard. Yet going by number of complaints only makes them look worse.