The Legal Ombudsman has recently carried out research to gain a better understanding of the transparency of service providers’ online complaints information – how easy it is for potential complainants to access information on how to complain from service providers’ websites.
This follows on from the commitment made in the Legal Ombudsman’s 2021-22 Business Plan to undertake research to understand the drivers behind high complaint volumes and in particular, early contact by consumers.
Our own internal research found that early consumer contact numbers have remained static despite regulators bringing in new rules in 2018 for service providers to improve the transparency of their complaints handling processes on their websites. Although this is not the only way that consumers raise complaints with their service providers, it is nonetheless one of the most common methods of consumers obtaining this information.
While we had envisaged that the 2018 rules would make a big difference to reducing premature contacts at the Legal Ombudsman, we found that in reality, it has had very little impact, and early contact figures have remained at a consistent figure of around 30% of the total number of contacts received year on year.
Further internal analysis found that for those service providers with the highest volume of early complaints, complaints information was not readily visible or accessible on their websites and there was an inconsistent approach to how complaints information was being presented. We therefore commissioned Community Research, an independent specialist in bringing the voices of communities into organisations, to conduct further research on how accessible this information was to service users.
41 users of legal services were asked to take part in a series of online tasks relating to the process of making a complaint and the transparency of complaints information on service providers’ websites.
The research found that people often opted to look for complaint information from the home page or from within the ‘Contact us’ tab initially. Many found that the information wasn’t there which meant having to scroll through multiple menus before finding the information which was further obscured by the assumption that consumers would read ‘the small print’ contained within the footer of a web page.
In short there was a general call from the participants for complaints information to be more prominent on legal service providers’ websites.
So, what’s next?
We firmly believe that service providers should welcome complaints and not fear them, as they can be a learning exercise which the service provider can use to improve the service they provide to all their clients.
The benefits of publishing clear complaints information are proven to be far greater than not publishing them at all; for example, learning from the feedback, and financial benefits too as it’s far less costly to deal with a complaint appropriately at tier 1 stage than to let it drag out unnecessarily.
We want to encourage service providers to increase the transparency of their complaint’s information to help set more positive expectations with consumers. We believe this should also help lower early consumer contact at the Legal Ombudsman and the demand on our front-end service team.
The LSB will be reviewing tier 1 complaint handling this year too so we can work collaboratively with them to help to address all the issues we have discovered through our research and ensure that complaints information is readily available online for those who need it.
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