Almost a fifth (19%) of clients have moved to a different wealth provider due to poor complaint services.
Olympic-themed research paper ‘Complaints: Going for Gold’, from Simplify Consulting, found 25% of complaints raised were not dealt with to the customer’s satisfaction.
Additionally, 31% claimed that they were not kept up to date throughout their complaints process and 44% found it was not clear who they had to contact or how to even make their complaint.
Meanwhile, three quarters said complaints took longer to resolve than anticipated.
Simplify Consulting said: “The introduction of the Consumer Duty has put increased pressure on wealth firms to ensure robust processes are in place when dealing with complaints as well as prioritising customer care.”
The Financial Conduct Authority found that in 2023 H2, financial services firms received 1.87m complaints.
Simplify Consulting director and co-founder Kate Monserrate said: “The long-term trends show an industry that still hasn’t managed to move the dial significantly on complaints.
“We still see complaints across all FCA-regulated firms increasing over the last 10 years, even if they have come down from the PPI and Covid peaks.
“For wealth-management firms, investments and pension-related complaints have risen by 20% and 24% respectively between 2014 and 2023.
“It is vital that complaints are not just dealt with in a swift and satisfactory manner but that firms leverage the insight from complaints in the right way.
“That way, we’ll see how complaints can be transformed from a necessary but low-key must-have for most firms into a vital mechanism to understand where and why things have gone wrong for customers.”
In the research paper, Simplify has laid out five key Olympic events to explain how to shape and deliver a gold standard complaints service proposition:
1: Archery (complaints strategy)
2: Rowing (investigating and embedding root cause)
3: Relay Race (process design)
4: Football (people and culture)
5: 100-metre sprint (technology)
To obtain these results, Simplify Consulting conducted a survey of over 100 consumers of wealth products (including workplace pensions, Isas and/or life insurance products).
