BBC Set To Simplify TV Complaints Department

While most companies would obviously want to try and deter people from using their ‘complaints department’, the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, seemingly have no choice but to draw some attention to it for the purposes of dissatisfied viewers, as they revitalised their complaints service to make the process ‘faster, simpler and easier’ for all concerned.

While this may be seen as a poor move and encouragement for people to write in with something unconstructive, the corporation also added that they will be saving time and money by no longer communicating with those that have ‘trivial or vexatious complaints’.

The plans follow a report from the House of Lords last July that strongly suggested improvements are made to ‘the convoluted and overly complicated complaints process at the BBC’, with offloading the responsibility to government media regulator Ofcom one of the suggestions.

It seems, though that the BBC will remain handling their potential issues in-house, with the planned new system, which will go live on 26 June, designed to feature a ‘central point’ to better organise what are defined as complaints, with messages coming in from several areas of their websites. Additional features will include the provision of a phone number and weblink alongside the complaints e-mail address, and plans to respond to same-subject complaints with a same response being sent to all matching queries, as opposed to answering one-by-one.

While the ‘trivial’ complaints will be given the right of appeal, the main focus of the reform is the ‘substansive’ issues raised towards them, as the BBC claim that as per standard, they will be responded to within 30 days, although this limit will not be applied to their online-only content, such as news stories. The system will be tested even after its delivery, with plans to do random ‘mystery shopper’ investigations to check that the process is being handled as it should.

The BBC Trust have insisted that they will intervene if any of the guidelines are abused, as their ‘Complaints & Appeals Board’ chairman Richard Ayre states: “We have agreed improvements to the complaints system to speed it up, simplify it, and focus resources where they are genuinely needed. If the BBC gets something wrong, these changes should ensure complaints get more quickly to the people best placed to deal with them. And, if the BBC sometimes gets things badly wrong, it should deliver a remedy that’s timely and unambiguous.”

While they are looking to a potential end of needing to respond to complaints such as some of those featured on the Advertising Standards Authority’s recent ‘most controversial’ list, they will also hope that none of ‘those’ complainers considers it to be a big problem…