Complaints and compliments

 

See how we're dealing with customer complaints

Throughout 2012, we've made some changes to the way we handle your complaints. You have told us that a phone call is a great way to get issues sorted out. The important things being that we;

  • Make it easy for you to get an answer
  • Sort things out quickly
  • Contact you when we say we will.

In 2011 we began to create a dedicated telephone based complaint handling team. In 2012 we have built on this, focusing on training our Customer Care Team to become experts in their field and improving your access to their help and knowledge.

In the last six months we have:

  • Grown the Customer Care Team, ensuring it is fully equipped to deal with your complaints and to resolve them where possible during your initial contact with us
  • Extended our opening hours, from Monday - Friday to Monday - Sunday with our Customer Care Team now being available from 8am to 10pm
  • Empowered our people, so they can make quicker decisions to improve our service to you
  • Provided additional and specialised training to both our central team and front line colleagues, through our internal Professional Standards Scheme
  • Consolidated our new approach to root cause analysis, so we can better identify problems and fix them so they don't keep happening
  • Introduced a new governance structure to ensure any emerging issues are escalated to our senior management team so that they can be resolved quickly
  • Extended our customer satisfaction survey to measure our success at handling complaints and provide you with an opportunity to comment on our service. This will help us plan our next improvements.

In the next six months we plan to:

  • Analyse your responses to our satisfaction survey to help us develop a plan of action to further improve our complaint handling service
  • Continue to refine and improve our root cause analysis programme
  • Train more colleagues as complaint handling specialists and roll out our internal Professional Standards Scheme.

We will continue to stay focused on the small but important things that make all the difference, resolving your complaint quickly, with empathy and to your satisfaction.

So you can see how we've done in 2012, we've provided a summary of our complaints data for the second half of 2012, simply click on one of our three companies below.

Publication Data No. of complaints opened No. of complaints closed Complaints closed within eight weeks Closed complaints upheld by firm1
Banking 64,050 67,615 87.2% 29.6%
Home Finance 4,359 4,994 89.4% 40.2%
General Insurance and Pure Protection 111,185 125,400 84.8% 68.0%
Decumulation2, Life & Pensions 2,432 2,546 86.7% 14.0%
Investments 1,695 1,541 78.5% 41.3%

Banking: We have 2.6 opened complaints per 1,000 relevant banking accounts. We closed 67,615 complaints.

Home Finance: We have 5.0 opened complaints for every 1,000 home finance loans.

General Insurance and Pure Protection: We have 3.3 opened complaints per 1,000 general insurance and pure protection products. This excludes complaints relating to payment protection insurance which HSBC stopped selling in November 2007. With PPI complaints included, we received 56.0 complaints per 1,000 relevant accounts. The volume of PPI complaints that have been opened has continued to increase from those recorded in the first half of 2012.

Decumulation, Life & Pensions: We have 5.0 opened complaints per 1,000 decumulation, life and pensions products.

Investments: We have 1.4 opened complaints per 1,000 investment products.

Publication Data No. of complaints opened No. of complaints closed Complaints closed within 8 weeks Closed complaints upheld by firm1
Banking N/A N/A N/A N/A
Home Finance N/A N/A N/A N/A
General Insurance and Pure Protection 205 202 97.5% 34.2%
Decumulation2, Life & Pensions 161 151 100.0% 43.0%
Investments 8 9 88.9% 55.5%

General Insurance and Pure Protection: We received 0.1 complaints per 1,000 general insurance and pure protection products.

Decumulation, Life & Pensions: We received 0.5 complaints per 1,000 decumulation, life and pensions products.

Investments: We received 0.8 complaints per 1,000 investment products.

Publication Data No. of complaints opened No. of complaints closed Complaints closed within 8 weeks Closed complaints upheld by firm1
Banking N/A N/A N/A N/A
Home Finance N/A N/A N/A N/A
General Insurance and Pure Protection 2 2 100.0% 0.0%
Decumulation2, Life & Pensions 11 11 100.0% 0.0%
Investments 287 387 76.7% 58.7%

We received 0.3 complaints per 1,000 products provided.

Notes
1 'Complaints upheld by firm' refers to the percentage of complaints that the bank has found in the customer's favour either in whole or part.
2 'Decumulation' is the way in which customers can turn their accumulated assets into an income. This can be done, for example, to help provide an income for retirement.

See how we're doing compared to the rest
For further information and published complaints data, including other UK banks, visit:
Financial Services Authority
Financial Ombudsman Service

Complaints History
H1 2012 published complaints (1 January - 30 June 2012)
H2 2011 published complaints (1 July - 31 December 2011)
H1 2011 published complaints (1 January - 30 June 2011)
H2 2010 published complaints (1 July - 31 December 2010)

Do you have a question?

Ask Olivia



Sorry, our 'Virtual assistant' only works if you have javascript enabled. If you have a question for us and can't view this tool, please call us on 08457 404 404. Lines are open 8am to 10pm everyday.

Calls may be monitored or recorded for quality and training purposes.

Need to speak to us?

Give our friendly team a call on:

08457 404 404

Textphone 18001 08457 125 563
Lines are open from 8am to 8pm every day except for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. Calls may be monitored or recorded.

Prefer to talk face-to-face?

Pop into your nearest branch for a chat.

Find a branch