Compliance control through undercover customers according to the Goldilocks Principle

Tuesday. A customer, as usual, performs his usual shopping routine. During this time, he searches, investigates and encounters problems related to customer service, including filing formal complaints. Unknowingly, the company witnessed a verification and evaluation of their claims process.

Increasingly, compliance procedures of consumer law regulation are required by companies, in order to structure processes that allow the user to respond to a complaint, involving their personnel and establishing responsibilities so that a prompt solution to the requirements is given. Even more when the Administrative Authority has ruled in the Consumer Protection and Defense Code (Peru) that the procedures for compliance with this regulation can be presented before the same authority as a special or attenuating circumstance in a sanctioning procedure, initiated by a consumer or ex officio.

However, in order to achieve effective consumer satisfaction, we must first understand the risks and shortcomings of our response procedure, in order to propose solutions that, in turn, may be subject to control over time, which allow their permanence in time.

In that sense, we are led to the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", in which a girl, called Goldilocks, sneaks into the house of three bears and try three bowls of food. The first was too hot, the second too cold, but when tasting the third bowl she found that it was the right temperature, finishing with all its content.

The "Goldilocks Principle" is that analogous theory of the childhood story in which the concept of "fair amount" is review, by which it is possible to determine a middle level in which a situation, requirement or activity is balanced.

This application has landed in disciplines such as psychology, astronomy, medicine, communication, among others; not being able to exempt the application of this principle in the legal field, even more in the case that concerns us.  

According to what has been said, the control of compliance actions should not be too cold or too hot. Managers should not exert excessive control over their employees, because this action generates greater bureaucracy and methods that will slow down their processes. In the same sense, it is not feasible for a company to have a response plan for legal contingencies, without it establishing a specific control plan, which allows it to measure its level of effectiveness against real cases of affected consumers.

Thus, regarding the control of compliance in consumer issues, the undercover costumer’s methodology is another viable option to check our response plan to claims. This verification is carried out in a real scenario, whose management of the incident must be timely and effective, which allows having a result regarding the implementation and application of our compliance procedures.

This method is not presented as a shocking negative experience as would be the case of an inspection of the company or an administrative authority (hot bowl), nor as a practice on which no experience occurs (cold bowl), but rather, it is a fair dose of control over our employees, which should be managed according to the needs of each company, be it service or manufacturing.

Finally, we must consider that compliance with the regulations and their control must be aimed at generating an organizational culture of prevention, which serves both to empower our internal client (employees), as well as to give security to our external customers. All this in order to generate greater value to the company.

 

 

Author: José Garaycochea – Intellectual Property Specialist
Law Firm: OMC Abogados & Consultores