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Introduction

Background

Ofcom is the independent watchdog for the communications industries, so if you’re a customer of phone and internet services it’s our job to look after your interests.

This includes making sure you get a proper hearing when you have complaints against communications companies (we’ll call them ‘providers’ in this booklet).

This consultation looks at how we are doing this at the moment, and whether there are things we could improve.

Getting a proper hearing

In a perfect world, healthy competition between companies would protect you from problems such as overcharging. But life isn’t like that, so if you run into problems Ofcom looks out for your interests in two ways:

• we make sure that your provider has a proper procedure to handle and respond to your complaint; and
• if the complaint still can’t be settled, you can take it to an independent third party who we have approved. This is called Alternative Dispute Resolution (‘ADR’).

At the moment, we require providers to have a written Complaints Code of Practice. Ofcom must see and approve this Complaints Code, and the provider must follow it. In case this doesn’t solve the problem, your provider must also be a member of an independent ADR scheme that we have approved: either ‘CISAS’ or ‘Otelo’.

Generally speaking, we think the system is working reasonably well. However, things could be better: we’ve seen signs of customers being unhappy with the way providers run their own complaints procedures. We have also heard about customers having problems getting access to an ADR scheme.

We are therefore making some new proposals which we think will improve things for customers. Please spend a few minutes reading them, and then tell us what you think.

The full document is available below:

• How Companies Handle Your Complaints: Review of Alternative Dispute Resolution and Complaints Handling Procedures [pdf]
  Full Print Version

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