Resolve customer complaints…  like a viking

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that many businesses don’t want to hear from you about any complaints you might have, so they make it near impossible to contact them.

Yet half of all the business sectors in the UK are regulated and have an obligation to handle complaints fairly and within set time limits. If they don’t, you can take your complaint further - for free. These organisations are known as ombudsmen or alternative dispute resolution services.

An ombudsman service is a free and impartial alternative to the courts. These schemes were created because the government was concerned that only the wealthy could afford access to justice.

Even though more people than ever are using ombudsman schemes, research from the Energy Ombudsman found that a significant majority of people in the UK don’t know about how these schemes can help. That’s despite the fact that regulated businesses are legally obliged to tell their customers about the ombudsman or mediation scheme if they fail to sort your complaint out.

So what exactly is an ombudsman? Excitingly, it’s a 1,000 year old concept we inherited from the Vikings. ‘Ombudsman’ is actually a Scandinavian word, meaning ‘man of the people’. Back then, a community leader would mediate in a dispute – impartially and fairly, no matter how rich or poor you were.

Flash forward to the present day and ombudsmen decide cases in much the same way. They must follow the law – the courts remain the highest authority in the land – but they can also factor in things like whether a business has acted ‘fairly or reasonably’. This means you can sometimes get a much better result from an ombudsman than the courts which can only consider the letter of the law, not whether a business is acting fairly.

You don’t need to pay someone to help you bring a complaint to the ombudsman or act on your behalf (unless you want to). Ombudsman schemes are designed to be accessible, so you communicate with the ombudsman in your own words. All you need to do is explain what’s gone wrong and what you want the business to do to sort things out.

In the UK, we have two types of ‘official’ scheme you can go to if there’s a problem. Ombudsman and Alternative Dispute Resolution schemes (ADR).

Ombudsman schemes tend to have more powers to ‘compel’ businesses to follow their final decisions. ADR schemes may be slightly more informal but in almost all sets of circumstances, they are also free.

So what do ombudsmen and ADR schemes cover? The main categories are; energy, finance, telecoms, legal services, motoring, airlines and more. However, there are some notable exceptions. I’m sorry to say that there’s no dispute scheme for the most complained-about sector in the UK: retail. And the most consistently loathed sector – package delivery – also has no ombudsman scheme, despite being regulated by Ofcom. The good news though is the government are listening and hopefully those gaps will be filled soon.

Ombudsman schemes are the ‘gold star’ service, though there’s quite a lot of variance between all the different schemes and their powers. That’s why I’m campaigning for a standard model for all ombudsman services – and I’d love your thoughts. I’d like to see:

• A set, maximum timescale for businesses to investigate a complaint before you can automatically go to an ombudsman.
• The same legal powers compelling every business to pay out if it loses a dispute.
• One single ombudsman scheme for each sector
• Every business in the UK must have a single ombudsman scheme.

So if you feel that your complaint hasn’t been heard, don’t give up, take it up with an ombudsman.

Martyn James is a leading consumer rights campaigner, TV and radio broadcaster and journalist. Read more articles from Martyn at this link,