Standards
WPA has released its standards of service figures for 2004 in a bid to encourage more providers to be open about standards of service.
The results reveal a mixed pic-ture, showing that, while the time taken to respond to cus-tomer correspondence improved to just 2.49 days from 2.69 days in 2003 and that 99.9% of claims were paid within six wor-king days, up from 99.5% the previous year, there were some disappointing findings. Complaints referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service per 100,000 people rose to 3.1 from 2.51 and the time taken from application to the issue of policy documentation rose to 6.38 working days from 5.91 in 2003.
"The aim of these figures is to make customers become more demanding," said Charlie MacEwan, head of communication at WPA. "We operate in a service industry yet prospective cus-tomers get no information about the service they can expect to receive. We would like to remedy that."
