Where to go when you have a complaint - Diana Clement

There are many free services in New Zealand that can customers help with complaints. Photo / 123RF

Diana Clement is a freelance journalist who has written a column for the Herald since 2004. Before that, she was personal finance editor for the Sunday Business (now The Business) newspaper in London.

OPINION

Who can I complain to? Free services from New Zealand’s three financial ombudsmen often appear in this column.

There is also a long list of other organisations to which thousands of people complain each year when they are unhappy with interactions with education, telecommunication and electricity providers, financial advisers, ACC, motor vehicle dealers, builders and others. The Tenancy Tribunal is another big one that can help resolve financial disputes between landlords and tenants, or homeowners in dispute with body corporates.

Internal complaints departments and processes often lean towards their own interests. The great thing about dispute resolution services is that people get an independent hearing.

The three ombudsmen are the Banking Ombudsman, Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman and Financial Services Complaints. Another organisation, Fair Way, runs multiple free and paid dispute resolution services for everything from telecom providers to ACC.

More than 3000 New Zealanders a year complain about their telephone and internet providers to Fair Way’s telecommunications dispute resolution service and almost the same number complained to its ACC review and conciliation service last year. It also offers dispute resolution for many financial advisers through its financial dispute resolution service.

Among Fair Way’s list of services is Study Complaints/Ngā Amuamu Tauira, through which domestic and international students who have disputes over the cost of tertiary education, or other aspects of their study, can seek independent review. Students don’t always get the right information from their tertiary institutions when they enrol and disputes are often about fees when students pull out of courses.

Fair Way took over the Natural Hazards Commission/Toka Tū Ake (formerly EQC) complaints service on July 1 this year. There will, no doubt, be demand for this. Thanks to earthquakes, floods, cyclones and other natural disasters in the past decade, many Kiwis have found themselves left out of pocket by EQC decisions.

Several other organisations offer dispute resolution services, such as Utilities Disputes for complaints about electricity, gas and water.

Most of these services publish previous complaint summaries online and they are often fascinating IMHO. For Utilities Disputes, the summaries are often about anything from providers switching customers without their permission to iPhones being charged for but not delivered. Some are more obscure, such as the homeowner who was plagued with bad smells from a water provider’s biofilter. The resolution for that involved the provider installing an air conditioner in the customer’s house.

Motor dealers are often complained about too. Who hasn’t heard a story of a dodgy car being sold to an unsuspecting buyer? The Motor Vehicle Disputes Tribunal deals with disputes over sums up to $100,000. Case studies on the NZ Legal Information Institute databases suggest it’s not uncommon for complainants to seek to reject the car. Some are successful. It’s definitely worth searching the names of car yards before buying from them. Some appear rather too often in complaints.

For all of these complaints services, customers almost always need to go first through the company or organisation’s internal complaints services. If that complaint reaches deadlock, then check if the organisation belongs to an independent complaints service, such as the ones mentioned here.

For dispute resolution where there is no mandated free service, there are quite a few private providers of paid mediation. These can be a good solution for high-value complaints. For example, for builders who are not members of the Master Builders Association, the options are to go through the courts or agree to paid-for mediation by an independent company.

Not all companies and organisations have to provide independent complaints resolution. Tell me about it. I’m needling Jetstar currently to give a refund for the flight that careered off the runway in Christchurch. Other passengers have been refunded but the airline has stuck two fingers up to me so far. In this sort of situation, keep posting on their social media. They don’t like that. If all else fails, go to the Disputes Tribunal. It costs only $45 to complain.