The world’s top consumer businesses treat client complaints as valuable inputs into their efforts to improve continuously. It’s a best practice that Canada’s financial services would do well to study. Too many in the Canadian investment industry view complaints as problems to be managed.
After 20 years of assisting retail investors, I have spoken with retirees who waited months to receive a complaint response. These are people who needed access to funds for living expenses — people who trusted a firm and then felt abandoned. While they waited, they endured stress and financial strain.
A fundamental reframing of the nature of complaints would dramatically improve the Canadian financial services industry. Framing complaints as a supervisory exercise is restraining industry maturation and causing investors to lose trust.
Complaints sit somewhere between a compliance obligation and an operational administrative process. They are opened, processed, tracked, closed and reported. Process efficiency is the priority.
When complaints are treated as problems to be processed rather than a service to be delivered, the underlying path is unlikely to improve. Regulatory burden will increase, complaint volumes remain high and the same problems will recur.
A more progressive approach is to view complaints as diamonds in the rough — a treasure trove of client-experience information.
Complaints are market intelligence. They constitute a rich data set. Every complaint is an opportunity to improve disclosures, advice, supervisory practices and systems. Each has the potential to help improve processes and products.
Great companies treat complaint resolution as a service — a core and determined part of what they deliver to clients. That approach leads to a better reputation and stronger client retention.
A service is designed — something a firm invests in and measures for effectiveness. It comes with high standards, fairness and a commitment to positive client outcomes.
If complaints were treated with the same attention and rigour as marketing, pricing and distribution, would better outcomes result? Deep down, we all know the answer.
Change the framework
Assign ownership to complaint resolution. The owner has an unambiguous mandate, authority, standards, a budget and direct unimpeded access to the executive suite. Ownership at this level tends to change how prioritization, staffing and design decisions are made.
The complainant is no longer an adversary. In a service framework, a complaint provides valuable feedback and an opportunity to demonstrate that the relationship can withstand a challenging moment. Clients who feel genuinely heard are less likely to seek outside intervention or transfer accounts.
Step one is to make it easy for clients to lodge a complaint. Make access simple. Be clear about what information is required and expected timing. Deliver prompt complaint acknowledgement and periodic progress updates.
Resolution then becomes an integral part of the service offering. It is designed from a client perspective and has experience-based standards, not just throughput-based ones. Compliance and process metrics still matter, but they sit alongside measures such as resolution quality, perceived fairness, timeliness and client satisfaction.
Modern analytics, root cause analysis and AI can organize and analyze these complaints at scale, revealing patterns, pinpointing systemic issues and identifying opportunities for improvement far faster than manual review alone. Firms that get this right resolve complaints and inform pricing, product quality and operational decisions with real-world evidence.
Corporate culture will follow. Academic research has pointed to culture as a root cause of poor complaint performance. It shifts when beliefs about what complaints represent change from evidence of failure to evidence of engagement.
When executive leadership views a well-serviced complaint as a service achievement and celebrates it with the same enthusiasm as other performance metrics, the behaviours that follow are materially different.
None of this will deliver an immediate drop in complaint volumes. Indeed, complaints may rise initially.
Issues will surface earlier, they will be resolved more quickly, they won’t recur and fewer will progress to the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments or civil litigation.
Clients who feel the process has been timely, fair and transparent, even when the outcome is not in their favour, are unlikely to go further and will remain loyal clients. With a positive reputation, the time, resources and cost of attracting new clients will decline.
The Canadian financial services industry faces a strategic choice. It can continue treating complaints as a compliance burden, or it can recognize them as a valuable source of client intelligence and trust-building. Organizations that make this transition will resolve complaints more effectively and build stronger institutions, more loyal clients and a more trusted financial system.