Working to continually improve the complaint process for all

Since we opened our doors 5 years ago, we have handled hundreds of thousands of consumer complaints. During this time, we’ve gathered feedback to continually improve our complaint process and the Consumer Complaint Database. As part of that continued work, we are publishing a notice in the Federal Register for a new information collection aimed at further improving the complaint process for consumers and companies.

Through this notice, we intend to give consumers the option to provide feedback on the company’s response to and handling of their complaints. The consumer would have the ability to rate the company’s handling of his or her complaint on a one-to-five scale and provide a narrative description in support of the rating. Consumer feedback will be shared with the company that responded to the complaint to inform its complaint handling and used to inform our work to supervise companies and monitor the market for consumer financial products and services. 

This survey builds on a public inquiry we issued last year seeking public input on ways to highlight consumers’ positive experiences with financial service providers. Positive feedback about the company’s handling of the consumer’s complaint would be reflected by both high satisfaction scores and by the narrative in support of the score. Negative feedback about the company’s handling of the consumer’s complaint would offer new context and be more useful to companies.