Jo Ucukalo

So you don’t need to be a lawyer to take care of these jobs?

The level of complaints that we take on are before a lawyer, so sometimes we advise people that they should go and seek that kind of assistance because it is a specific dispute. We’re that step before that where we’re trying ascertain who’s responsible for what, what outcome we can achieve.

Can you give us some examples of the cases you take on?

Say you’ve got a product that has broken just outside of its manufacturer’s warranty.  Or customer service, that’s a big one for us – we can assist you with getting a response or a result from your customer service complaints.

It doesn’t just have to be, “My terms and conditions have let me down and now I have to pay another $500” or something.

It can be, “I had a poor experience with my organisation, now can you do something to make me feel like a valued customer and address this complaint?”

The other thing to remember is that they say only 5% of consumers complain.

And at a practical level, how do you deal with complaints?

We work with the consumer, understand what the complaint is and then we put it together as a package. We don’t drip-feed information generally speaking. We put it together as a package and then send that through as a complaint.

This gives the business a background, and the complaint is then less likely to get lost or confused because it’s all packaged up and answers the questions we know the business is going to ask, such as what’s gone wrong, the proof of purchase, who they spoke to. We try to collate all that sort of information up front.

What is your success rate so far and how many cases have you dealt with?

To date we’ve done about 1,500 complaints. Our success rate is currently around 72% which is fairly reasonable.

Obviously we expect that to be higher in the future as our reputation grows and people will understand that we’re not just taking on frivolous complaints, and we get smarter at doing business.

We do screen through the complaints to say, “Yes we can assist you” or “Unfortunately we can’t assist you for these reasons”.

And when we can’t help someone, we do try and offer suggestions on what they can do next, or who can they contact, and also send through templates to assist them to manage their own complaints.

Do you charge by the hour or a success fee?

We charge a success fee. In 99.98% of cases people are looking for a financial result and what we term as a financial outcome is a repair, replacement, compensation or a good will payment.

A small percentage of our customers say, “We don’t care about the financial outcome, we just want a response,” so they’ll be charged our minimum fee which is $110.

But how we charge is 20% plus GST of the financial outcome. Essentially if we don’t get you the outcome that you desire there’s no outlay for our service.

That would require your screening process to be quite strict.

Yes exactly.

But what has really been heartening for me – because I do most of the screening simply because I’ve got a better feel for it and I’ve been doing it the longest – there is a significantly high percentage of customers that approach us who have got a really genuine complaint.

They’re not looking for something for nothing, they’re not looking for a freebie, they’re not looking for something that they don’t honestly think is owed to them for a particular reason.

Do you mould your response according to the sector?

According to the complaint, actually.

The majority of our customers have tried and failed to resolve their complaint.

Having said that, we do have some people that just outsource every complaint to us because they don’t want the conflict confrontation, they just feel like, “Okay, you guys can just do that for me” regardless of what it is.

What is the most common area of complaint and which sectors dominate?

The complaints that we receive have well exceeded my expectation in variety – when I first started the business there was no way I could have dreamed up the type of complaints that we have received.

But the key ones that we seem to see a lot of is obviously the telecommunications industry, the energy sector, banking sector and a lot of electrical equipment and motor vehicles as well.

But there are also beauty-industry complaints, we’ve got cruise complaints, we’ve got removalist complaints and complaints about freight charges.

It just astounds me just how many different types of complaints.

And the complaints are centred on customer service?

Absolutely, and I think that is really probably where we can see our biggest growth because people are accustomed to saying, “Hey I’ve got a complaint because I’ve got no mobile phone coverage, I’ve got a complaint because my washing machine has broken down and it’s only two-years-old”.

People are used to having those complaints and having those complaints addressed. But we can now deal with customer service issues and get good results as well.

For example, we’ve got a case where a pregnant woman was on a flight and presented with a few medical issues, but the cabin crew member on-board didn’t deal with it appropriately and she ended up in tears.

When I spoke to her about it – I have a background in the airline industry – she said, “Look, I wouldn’t normally do this but it really upset me and I’m still upset about it.”

So then we raised the complaint with the airline and it was very quickly resolved and customer was really satisfied with the outcome.

The airline has given her quite a significant credit to fly with them again because they recognise they’re actually in the customer service industry.

A lot of times people go, “I’ve had bad service but how can I prove that it was that bad?”

And according to the Australian Consumer Survey Report in 2011, a quarter of consumer problems raised with businesses remain unresolved, so if we can work towards getting that number reduced I think we’ve done a good job.

How many staff members do you have?

We currently have six. We’ve had pretty good growth and so we feel we’re going to do a lot better for the next year but it’s a good starting point anyway.

I wouldn’t have dreamed that I’d really be in this position with complaints three years ago, two years ago. I wouldn’t have expected that, it was such an untapped market.

And your revenue?

Last calendar year we did just under $500,000 in revenue but we’re expecting revenue to around the $3 million mark next calendar year because the past four months have been really strong for us.

That’s great. Thanks for talking, Jo.