Complaints, Complaints, Complaints

by Anthony Demangone

The FTC recently released its annual report on consumer complaints.  The FTC press release will get most of the attention.  It lists the dreaded “top 10” consumer complaints of 2012.

 

	Number	Percent
Debt collection	199,721	10 percent
Banks and Lenders	132,340	6 percent
Shop-at-Home and Catalog Sales	115,184	6 percent
Prizes, Sweepstakes and Lotteries	98,479	5 percent
Impostor Scams	82,896	4 percent
Internet Services	81,438	4 percent
Auto-Related Complaints	78,062	4 percent
Telephone and Mobile Services	76,783	4 percent
Credit Cards	51,550	3 percent

 

From this, you can get a general feeling of what bothers American’s consumers.

But if you dig further, this report can yield so much more.  A ton more. 

The report breaks down complaints by state.  For example, here’s what the report tells us about Alabama.

Alabama

Adjusted for population differences, Alabama consumers ranked 30th in terms of the number of complaints about fraud and other miscellaneous categories. But Alabama ranks 10th in complaints about identity theft.  (Data from p. 15.)

There’s a specific page of the report that details all the complaints in Alabama. On that page, you’ll see that Alabama consumers, setting aside identity theft, focused 20 percent of their complaints at debt collectors, banks and lenders.

If you are a financial institution in Alabama, why not brief your board on the national statistics, along with Alabama-specific data?  You can then explain how your credit union manages risks in those areas.

And such an analysis could easily be done for every state where you have operations.

Just an idea.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

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