The Commission’s Contact Centre is a small but busy team of advisers who are trained to deal with a diverse range of complaints and enquiries. The information they gather from complainants can spark an investigation under any of the competition and consumer laws the Commission enforces.
In 2012 the Contact Centre took 9,906 complaints and enquiries. This was a decrease on the 2011 year (10,637).
One stand-out trend among the complaints and enquiries received has been the growth over the past two years, and particularly in 2012, of complaints about online traders. These complaints generally raise Fair Trading Act issues, and have kept the Fair Trading team’s Low Level Enquiry Unit busy. A significant amount of time has been put in during 2012 to educating those running these websites. In 2013 we will be looking to take enforcement action, including potentially prosecuting, if these companies fail to comply with the Fair Trading Act.
In particular our staff noted a ‘boom’ of complaints in December apparently generated by new businesses that had sprung up on Facebook. These businesses allegedly took consumers’ money, didn’t deliver goods, and then shut their Facebook pages down. The issues raised by these complaints are more likely to amount to fraud, rather than a Fair Trading Act breach.
62% of complaints in 2012 related to the Fair Trading Act, which is roughly in line with previous years. Complaints under the Commerce Act accounted for 6%, and under the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act just 3%.
We noted an increase of 5% in the number of complaints and enquiries not covered by the Commission’s remit. Our staff are generally able to refer these people on to the correct agency. In total just over a quarter of the complaints and enquiries we receive are about issues the Commission cannot deal with. It is noted though that in future, with changes under the Consumer Law reform, some of these matters (such as currently covered by the Door to Door Sales Act and Layby Sales Act) will now be included in the Fair Trading Act.
The majority of the complaints and enquiries the Commission receives are through our 0800 number. However we also saw an increase in 2012 in complaints coming via email and our website complaint form, with a corresponding drop in the number of phone calls.
In 2012 we also noted that a lot of people like to ‘vent’ about problems with traders via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and chat forums. We trialled having our Contact Centre staff monitor a few key sites. Where they saw complaints that might raise issues under the Fair Trading Act staff advised the complainant to consider making a complaint via our website, or to read some helpful information on our website on the topic. As a result of the trial, our Contact centre staff will be regularly monitoring social media in this way in 2013.
