Handling complaints appropriately will help restore trust - Vicky Crichton

Britain, we are often told, is a nation of complainers. But is that really true?

Post-pandemic, many sectors are reporting higher levels of dissatisfaction and lower levels of tolerance among consumers, resulting in more frequent complaints – and angrier complainers.

It’s certainly the case that social media and online reviews have made it easier for us to bring our complaints to companies’ attention and to shame them, very publicly, into taking action.

When it comes to really difficult issues, though, complaining can be much harder.

Vicky Crichton is Director of Public Policy at the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission

In areas like healthcare or legal services, we’re often trusting a professional’s advice on an issue we know very little about. Few of us know what our will needs to include or how to set up a power of attorney. So when something goes wrong, that trust can feel sorely tested, even though we all know mistakes can happen.

Recent research from Consumer Scotland showed that Scots have high trust in lawyers, with 60 per cent of adults in their survey saying they would generally trust legal professionals to tell the truth. When asked to describe legal professionals, people used words like professional, knowledgeable and highly qualified. That reflects well on a sector where those attributes are the bedrock of the service being provided.

However, those same people also described lawyers as difficult to understand. That’s an issue we often see mirrored in complaints, where poor communication about costs, timescales and likely outcomes can lead to misunderstandings, confusion and a loss of trust.

With personal recommendations topping the poll for how people find a lawyer, reputation is all important. We listen to our friends and family when they say someone listened to them, explained things clearly and helped them solve their problem. People also tend to react positively to firms who deal well with complaints. It gives us confidence that if we need to raise an issue, it will be dealt with professionally rather than defensively.

We’ve recently been looking into the factors that might put people off complaining, from the emotional toll to worrying about potential consequences. It’s part of our job to make it as easy as possible for people to complain to us and to their legal services provider.

If there are barriers – real or perceived – that might put people off raising a concern, we want to do what we can to remove them. That means giving advice and providing any necessary assistance to allow someone to make a complaint in the first place. It also means offering guidance and training to law firms about best practice in dealing with complaints so that as many issues as possible can be solved at source. That’s important because the Consumer Scotland research also showed that less than half of legal services users were confident that they knew how to go about making a complaint.

We all have the right to raise a concern if we think the service we’ve received wasn’t up to scratch or the professional we’ve entrusted with our problem hasn’t acted appropriately. We should all be able to expect that complaint to be handled well. The good news is that when that happens, that all-important trust can be restored.

Vicky Crichton is Director of Public Policy at the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission