Experian - Secrets of Your Credit Rating - Channel 4 Dispatches

Whistler01

Good evening James,

I'll be open and honest. I am an ex Experian employee here who STILL holds concerns. I began working for the company in 2009. At that time I was advised to never mention the possibility of rapid updates and that continued through until I left in 2012.

I have a few other questions alongside this.

1/ Project Mort was in progress when I started back in 2009 and when I left was no closer to completion, will it ever actually take effect to allow the Person Identification Number and Data Identification Number (PIN and DIN) attached to each piece of data you hold to resolve all the data ownership problems you have?

2/ Why did you claim rapid updates are free? Lenders have no power to remove address links or searches at all, either by monthly update or by rapid update. All of these have to be requested via the database amendments team at the cost of £3.50 per amendment. Further to this, only some lenders have access to make amendments to their account data using the CAIS online service, the rest must pay as above. So why the claim it is free?

3/ Experian has 28 days to resolve any data queries you raise? How many are resolved in this time period?

4/ Callcredit has their free Noddle service where they can provide a free service. Why can't Experian.

5/ Are the vast majority of written queries from Credit Expert customers still handled by offshore departments in India and Sri Lanka?

6/ Are the phone teams still advised to tell customers who have a £2 report that they are not allowed to make telephone enquiries and that the telephone lines are for Credit Expert customers only. Essentially, are "statutory customers" (as they are referred to) treated as second class customer?

Your response, in particular to question one and two, would be greatly appreciated.

I_luv_cats

I signed up to an Expert trial and found an inaccuracy.


I was bounced between Experian and the financial institution with neither taking responsibility.



Finally after raising a (written) complaint Experian rectified it.



*The prog raised something on a similar line of being fobbed off by Experian.

KRS291

I wonder if it's a coincidence that Experian's phone number to cancel membership has been changed. Heres the new one: 0800 561 0083

JKSandy

The only interesting point in the programme was "potential aliases" never heard of this and I have no doubt lenders don't do any clarification and just refuse credit based on it.

JonB80

I didn't think much to this programme.

Didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know (except perhaps for the rapid update option). So whilst trying to show Experian making all these errors, the programme seemed to concentrate on the most extreme examples, a person who'd lived out if the country a long time and couldn't get credit, person with identical name and date of birth with a person who has poor credit and two with the people same at the same address.

Experian_company_representative

KRS291 wrote: »

I wonder if it's a coincidence that Experian's phone number to cancel membership has been changed. Heres the new one: 0800 561 0083

The number has not changed. Check out this Q&A from 2012:

http://experian.co.uk/consumer/questions/askjames300.html

James J

Experian_company_representative

@ Whister01 Happy to reply to all of your points.

The rapid update system is an internal term for a portal known to our lending clients for as 'CAIS Online' and is a tool they use, and decide when it's appropriate to use, to make manual overnight amendments to the data we hold for them when mistakes are identified. We don't usually flag it up to callers because a) most don't call about mistakes, so it's not relevant and b) when people do alert us to mistakes we contact the lender for them. In November last year we introduced a new process so our phone agents can raise data disputes for people while still on the phone. I think our agents did used to tell callers, including those chasing regular account changes (not mistakes), that lenders could do overnight updates and it started to cause problems for lenders. We have to help them manage this resource to avoid clogging the system up with non-urgent requests that are better taken care of using the monthly data refresh.

1) Mort is a multi-million pound project to further improve how we store and access data for customers and is part of our continued investment in technology, products, customer service and people. But the system works very well already! Mort is being rolled out right now across all our platforms, but big projects do take time.

2) CAIS Online is free to use and is for updating credit account data - which makes up most of our records and is the main thing people call about if they do spot an issue. Other data types, such as address links, have different systems and processes in place for maintenance. If we have to make manual amendments for lenders to correct mistakes we may charge an admin fee.

3) 28 days is the legal limit for responding. We try to fully resolve queries much quicker than this of course. We answer many simple queries the same day and on average within two days. Where we have to liaise with a lender, these queries are fully resolved on average within ten days.

4) We provide tens of thousands of free credit reports to the public every year but we choose to do this differently to the Callcredit. You can already get a report for a nominal fee of £2 and from research we've carried out this does not stop people checking their report. The biggest barrier is lack of knowledge or motivation, which is why we invest millions in education and advertising every year.

5) No, we have more the 300 people in our Nottingham-based contact centre who deal with more then 3.5m requests for advice and support from the public every year. We sometimes outsource back-office admin tasks to free up more our of UK-based team to help customers.

6) We provide telephone support for all customers/consumers but this varies in nature depending on how you're dealing with us. CreditExpert subscribers do get a dedicated helpline as part of their benefits package. But victims of identity fraud get free phone support from us and last year we helped about 12,500 people sort out their credit reports following fraud.

James J

fuzzgun19

Is it possible to contact Experian (cancelled free trial), just to ask if you are showing on the electrol roll yet?
It seems a waste of money spending £2 to see if it's updated, just to find it hasn't.

JonB80

Not sure if they'd disclose over the phone?

Archi_Bald

Experian_company_representative wrote: »

4) We provide tens of thousands of free credit reports to the public every year but we choose to do this differently to the Callcredit.

How do I get my Experian report for free, please? I do not want to go to the CAB or Step Change every time I would like to view my report, not least because it would be wasting their time.