The Consumer Complaints Service takes nothing for granted when it takes calls from unhappy clients


‘Are you the claimant or the defendant?’ asks James Creasey, a caseworker at the Consumer Complaints Service (CCS), as he tries to get to the bottom of a caller’s confusing problem with her solicitor while the Gazette listens in. ‘Erm, what’s that?’ she replies.



Such are the challenges facing those who staff the CCS’s helpline – the frontline of the solicitors’ proefession’s complaints-handling operation in Leamington Spa. With often vulnerable callers who have no understanding of the law, it is a world away from the ethics helpline along the road in Redditch; about the only thing in common are the large displays indicating how many calls are waiting, the average wait time and so on. ‘You have to be very careful that you don’t assume a level of knowledge,’ Mr Creasey says.



He has worked his way up from an administrative role to a level-two caseworker (there are three levels in all) and completed a part-time legal practice course while working at the CCS. But he has chosen to stay rather than go into private practice ‘because I really enjoy the work… the variety makes it a fantastic job’. It requires a good breadth of knowledge – ‘people often don’t know what their problem is’ – and to judge by the calls we heard, a great deal of patience.



It is a heavily supervised environment – all caseworkers have their calls and files regularly sampled – while staff is broken into teams of mixed experience, with a leader and two level-three caseworkers at the top of each to provide technical assistance and monitoring.



‘Solicitors are very good at dealing with complaints on the whole,’ Mr Creasey says. ‘The majority of complaints we receive are about those who are not and clients with unreasonable expectations.’ Managing those expectations is an important part of the work. ‘Some clients are more demanding than others. We expect a reasonable service from solicitors – not a perfect service.’



Some callers are headed off without having to open a file; problems with getting a solicitor to release a client’s files, for example, can be dealt with by a call from the CCS to explain to the solicitor that he has to comply with the request. That usually works.



Of those that make it through, the two most common areas of complaint, Mr Creasey says, are a lack of costs information, closely followed by poor communication. Files will be opened and then allocated to caseworkers to deal with during the periods when they are not on the helpline, although those that relate to conduct go to a special unit.



Poor service complaints displaying features that could make them more complex – such as a firm with a bad complaints history, a difficult client or just a tough issue – are sent to the complaints centre, where time is recorded and a charge for it can be recovered against the firm if the complaint is upheld.



The CCS can even generate work for solicitors. Such is the ambiguous nature of the name – the Law Society name is not emphasised – that the helpline receives complaints about broken fridges and the like. ‘Even then we can add value,’ Mr Creasey says. ‘We can refer them to Trading Standards or direct them to a solicitor to take it further.’