The mess of consumer complaints

The Christmas season, when everybody is out shopping for gifts, is the perfect time to discuss customer satisfaction, or more correctly, customer dissatisfaction.  

Over the past couple of weeks, the Fitzhugh has been working hard to unweave the complex fabric of where someone should go to get their consumer complaint heard.  The following is what we found.  

There are a number of agencies, some governmental, some not, of where a dissatisfied customer can go for assistance.  

Industry Canada, which is a federal agency, is probably not the best initial option if you think a company has tried to pull a fast one on you.  Most customer service regulations and guidelines fall under provincial jurisdiction and Industry Canada “itself is not an investigative dispute resolution agency,” according to Annie Trépanier, senior media relations advisor for Industry Canada.  

Service Alberta, a ministry in the provincial government, deals more with consumer complaints than Industry Canada. Service Alberta will address complaints that violate the Fair Trading Act. Essentially, a violation to this act occurs if there are “unfair practices, such as misleading information, exaggeration... misrepresentation,” said Mike Berezowsky, assistant director of communications for Service Alberta.  

If a consumer believes that, for instance, a sales person or business has misrepresented what a warranty will cover (whether a manufacturers’ or extended warranty), Service Alberta “can either temporarily or permanently take away their business license, which in effect, means that they can’t operate in Alberta,” said Berezowsky. The ministry can also issue a Director’s Order, “which tells them they have to comply with these regulation and meet those conditions,” and “if they continue to ignore the Director’s Order,” Service Alberta can take enforcement action or prosecute them under the Fair Trading Act, he said. 

Between Jan. 1, 2008 and Nov. 30, 2008, there were 23 concluded prosecutions, resulting in fines and over $170,000 recovered for consumers by Service Alberta, according to Berezowsky. Generally speaking, “the penalties under the Fair Trading Act are $100,000 or three time the profit from the violation, whichever is greater,  or up to two years in prison, or a combination” of these penalties, he said. 

However, your best bet as a dissatisfied customer is to lodge a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) of central and northern Alberta. The BBB in this region opens up about 200 complaints daily, and they have a relationship with different levels of government that have the ability to bring sanctions against a company, said Chris Lawrence, president and CEO of the BBB for central and northern Alberta.  

At any given time, this region’s BBB is monitoring approximately 50,000 companies, but only 3,000 of these are BBB accredited.  Accredited companies are obligated to live up to 14 standards which they must maintain, said Lawrence.  

Currently, the BBB has three ratings – neutral, satisfactory and unsatisfactory.  As of Jan. 1, 2009, the BBB will move to what Lawrence calls a “more robust system” where companies will be rated on a grading scale from F to A+.  This new system will also allow the seriousness of the complaint to factor into the rating, she said.  

One issue the new system will not address is the instance in which a large company has many holdings, and each holding is given a different rating because technically they are separate entities.  That means ratings for each subsidiary, do not factor in to the main company.  Therefore, the cynic may say that companies can diversify in order to avoid or distribute poor ratings over a larger number of companies than is ethically necessary.  Do your homework.

That being said, and putting the complexity of lodging a complaint aside, the BBB is probably a consumer’s best hope for some sort of redress.  “We’re self-regulatory,” said Lawrence.  “We can apply the truth, which has an impact on their bottom line.”

For more information or to lodge a complaint, please visit www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca or www.edmonton.bbb.org.