Organization and functioning of complaints offices: communication to intermediaries (only in Italian)

Description

The Bank of Italy attaches great importance to the proper management of the complaints that customers file with banks and financial intermediaries: the fact that these complaints are carefully examined is a meaningful indicator of the quality of the relationships between intermediaries and customers. Managing complaints efficiently makes it possible to maintain a relationship of trust with the customer and to detect any problems in the banking products and services provided or in how they are sold. This is why inspections were carried out in 2015 to see how complaints offices work; the checks revealed a set of good organizational practices to ensure timely, thorough and satisfying responses to customers, together with an effective use of the information retrieved from complaints. In some cases, the checks showed that there is some room for improvement in how things work. The Bank of Italy then sent a communication to the entire banking and financial system to illustrate some good practices, and asked each operator to carry out an in-depth examination of how it deals with complaints and to adopt initiatives designed to improve the quality of customer services.