As we all know there is turmoil in the world economy at the moment. Most South African’s hoped that we were far enough away from the US sub-prime crisis to not be too affected by it, but unfortunately it seems that we are experiencing a degree of financial and economic pain.

While this has been happening, the number of complaints lodged on www.getclosure.co.za has been steadily increasing every month but there has been a noticeable increase in the last three months (we saw an increase of about 50% from August to October). I am sure that a lot of the additional complaint volume is due to an increasing market awareness of our existence, but I suspect that some of it is driven by the fact that as a result of the economic downturn most consumers have less money to waste and are more determined to get value for their hard earned Rands.

On the other hand suppliers are also taking strain as a result of the reduction in consumer spending and so customer retention and customer satisfaction are vitally important to them.

Our statistics indicate that suppliers are responding to the increased volume of complaints but I think that at a time like this suppliers and the getclosure! team should be doing everything we can to make complaint resolution as easy and productive as possible.

We have identified a number of areas in which we think we could make our system even better specifically with regard to making it as easy as possible for suppliers to respond to their customer’s complaints, as well as keeping consumers more closely informed as to our communications with the suppliers. We would however appreciate any suggestions from either consumers or suppliers using our system. If you have any ideas that might be beneficial to our complaint resolution process please send them to customerservices@getclosure.co.za.

Brian is the IT manager of getclosure! and is responsible for the ongoing development and support of getclosure!’s complaints management platform.  Click here to read more about Brian.