Ombudsman Services | July 2020
While suppliers were entitled to prioritise some contacts over others, the rules surrounding complaints have not changed. In consequence, suppliers are required to signpost customers to ADR and we will accept them for investigation after eight weeks – even if the supplier had deemed the issue to be non-urgent.
Some consumers may have made unsuccessful attempts to log complaints with their supplier. They may consider their complaint began on the first date they tried to contact the supplier, even if they didn’t go through.
In such cases, we will consider whether the consumer made reasonable efforts to register their complaint.
If, for example, a customer was unable to contact a supplier via their preferred channel but refused to use other channels available to them to register their complaint, then we may determine that a complaint has not been made.
In other cases – if a customer did not have access to the channels offered by a supplier, or if the customer tried to make a complaint but could not obtain a response from the supplier (because telephone lines were too busy or the supplier did not respond to the complaint) we may decide to proceed with our investigation on the grounds that they “encountered sustained difficulty in registering their complaint” (as per our terms of reference).