FCCPC Mulls Regulation To Penalise Companies Without Consumer Complaint Platform

The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) is at the moment developing a regulation that would ensure that companies without a standalone, clear and accessible consumer complaints resolution platforms are duly penalised.

Executive vice chairman of the Commission, Mr Babatunde Irukera,who dropped this hint yesterday in Abuja, said the inability of most companies to effectively resolve consumer complaints, had been responsible for the geometric increase in the number of complaints the Commission receives on daily basis.

“Our complaint resolution team has become a multi-company customer service desk.

“The reason why people are coming to us more is that they can’t find the people who sold stuffs to them.

“There is no standalone, clear, accessible, well publicised resolution platforms by these companies for people to reach them.

“What we are doing is that we are going to write regulations, if you do not have that, there will be a penalty,’’ he said.

To create a seamless complaint resolution mechanism, he also hinted that the commission is working on a complaint resolution platform that would allow companies to plug in through a subscription and receive any consumer complaint relating to them.

“With your plugging in, as the system is, as complaint comes against you, it pushes it down to you and it is now your obligation to resolve it and we are seeing it.

“We will now start making them (companies) to pay a subscription since we created what they should have.

“Federal government should not be the one creating customer service platform for companies.

“We will make them pay a subscription to hook up and then when they do not resolve complaints on our dashboard, we will become secondary resolution mechanism and make them pay the cost of resolution,’’ he said.

“Between the time we raided and now, we have discovered additional 30 accounts and all have been frozen and we will continue to freeze as we discover them.

“I am certain that with the actions that we have taken and the nature of the engagement we are having with the loan companies, at least three of the major ones that their businesses have been severely affected by either our search or the account closure, they are modifying.

“It will take some time but I can assure you that the space is changing now,’’ he said.