Ian Jacobsohn, Independent Contributor

A customer complains through the call centre, email, WhatsApp, a branch or social media, and the instinct is to route it to whichever team already talks to customers every day. Complaints are customer interactions, after all.

That instinct is where the problem starts. Receiving a complaint and managing one are not the same thing. A call centre is often the right place for a customer to raise a complaint; it is not necessarily the right place to investigate it, resolve it, escalate it and turn it into organisational learning. That takes specialist capability, and it matters more as regulatory attention on customer outcomes and market conduct grows.

The FSCA’s 2025 Complaints Management Industry Review made this explicit, assessing institutions not just on how quickly complaints were answered but on effectiveness, timeliness, accessibility and fair customer outcomes. The better question is not how fast complaints are closed, but whether the organisation can properly understand, investigate and learn from them.

A different kind of interaction

Customer service helps people transact, get information and solve routine problems efficiently. A complaint changes the conversation: the customer is asserting that something went wrong and that the organisation must address it. That requires establishing what actually happened, whether the process followed was appropriate, and whether the outcome was fair, including whether it points to a problem beyond this one customer. These are investigation and governance questions, not call-centre ones.

The more complaints sit inside the call centre, the harder this becomes. The frontline employee may have handled the original interaction; their team leader is measured on that performance; the department carries targets for handling time, first-contact resolution and retention. None of that is wrong. It’s necessary for running a call centre. But it sits uneasily alongside the independence an investigation needs: the ability to step outside the original interaction, weigh the evidence and reach a conclusion based on facts rather than on defending an existing outcome.

More than a resolved case

Measuring only resolution (was the customer satisfied, was the case closed on time) misses much of the value. A complaint is also organisational intelligence. Ten customers complaining about the same process is a signal to investigate the process, not train another agent. A recurring system error calls for a fix, not another apology. A customer who has to complain repeatedly before anything changes is telling the organisation something its operational reporting probably isn’t.

A genuine capability should be able to answer four questions. Can someone investigate independently, with access to the evidence? Can they challenge an existing decision rather than simply defend it? Can the organisation spot recurring problems and escalate beyond the individual case? Can management see what complaints reveal about the business, and show what happened, what was considered and why?

If the answer is no, moving the complaints inbox from one department to another won’t fix it.

What COFI changes, and what it doesn’t

South Africa’s Conduct of Financial Institutions Bill pushes market conduct and customer outcomes further into institutional governance. That doesn’t mean every institution needs a large, standalone complaints department, or bureaucracy for its own sake. It means a capability proportionate to its nature, scale and complexity: competent people, defined processes and escalation routes, reliable management information, proper records and audit trails, and genuine oversight above them.

A smaller organisation may not need a dedicated investigations team, but it does need a documented process, trained people, clear escalation criteria, and access to specialist expertise when a case gets complex. A larger institution needs more sophistication. Either way, organisations need to know which complaints require specialist handling, and give the people handling them real authority and independence. This is an investment in customer outcomes and organisational control, not a cost centre.

The call centre still matters, as a starting point

Frontline staff need to recognise a complaint when they see one, capture it accurately, and know when to escalate rather than resolve. But being the first point of contact isn’t the same as owning the process through to resolution and learning.

The real question isn’t who handles complaints. It’s whether the organisation can hear, investigate, resolve and learn from them. A complaint isn’t just a customer asking for an answer. It may be the organisation being handed information it needs.

ENDS