The ethics of remediation

Complaints are a good source of feedback for helping an organisation read where customers don't think they're getting fair value or service. But as a sole indicator of overcharging or poor advice, they may raise too many false positives about the quality of the advice or the level of charging. The risk the program manager may not have appreciated is that may result in the limited resources being wasted on not delivering any value to the exercise or customers. Raising that concern and acknowledging the validity of complaint data would not be rejected by a reasonable program manager. Understanding the limitations the business's systems may have to identify impacted customers using other means, may make it challenging to use other metrics. That said, a useful approach may involve overlaying the complaints data with metrics like: compliance ratings, proportion of fees to customer portfolio value, complexity of investments and the level of fees charged, product/strategy areas where there is a high risk of poor advice and frequency of customer reviews performed by advisers. There's no easy way of identifying the customers most at need, but exploring the available options and limitations will help deliver a better outcome for customers.

All customers deserve to be compensated. If the lower filter is set at a level of say $20 and instead of a great deal of work being applied to calculating the exact amount of the remediation, each of those customers is given a credit of $20 it would save the business a great deal of work and anxiety. The limit can be moved but the principle remains tge same. Customers above the limit should have their actual or estimated loss calculated and they should be fully remediated.