Compliance2 min read
A grievance process that actually resolves things
Every lender publishes a grievance mechanism. The difference between one that works and one that exists is whether a complaint changes anything other than its own status.
Grievance redressal is usually built to satisfy a requirement: a named officer, an email address, a page on the website, a stated turnaround. All of that is necessary. None of it is sufficient, because a process can meet every published commitment while resolving nothing, and borrowers can tell the difference long before an auditor can.
The four things a working process has
- A single intake that catches complaints from every route, including the ones that arrive as a sentence in the middle of a collections call.
- A clock that starts at first contact rather than at the point somebody formally logged it.
- Access to the evidence: the recording, the transcript, the contact history and the account state, in one place.
- An outcome that can change something upstream, rather than only closing the ticket.
The intake problem is the big one
Most complaints never reach the grievance channel. They are said to a telecaller, who notes them or does not, and the borrower escalates only when nothing happens. By the time it arrives formally it has aged, hardened, and often gone to the regulator or to social media first. An operation that gives callers a one-click way to raise a complaint from inside the call, and that treats doing so as good behaviour rather than an admission, sees a very different volume and a very different tone.
Evidence, quickly
The first thing an investigator needs is what actually happened. If assembling that takes two days of requests to three teams, the published turnaround is being spent on retrieval rather than resolution. This is where recording indexing, transcripts and a complete contact history stop being compliance overhead and become the thing that lets you answer a borrower properly within the week.
Close the loop upstream
A complaint about a call made outside hours should end with someone checking why the window allowed it. A complaint about repeated contact should end with the frequency cap being examined. If complaints are only ever resolved individually, the same complaint arrives again, and the pattern is only visible to the person receiving them. Categorise complaints, count the categories monthly, and treat a rising category as a defect rather than a coincidence.
The measure that matters
Not the count of complaints, which will rise if you make it easier to complain, and that is a good thing. Measure the share resolved within the committed time, the share that recur from the same borrower, and the share that led to a change in a rule, a script or a setting. That last one is the only evidence that the process is connected to the operation.