Ofcom today fined EE (trading as 4GEE, Orange and T-Mobile) £1m for failing to comply with Ofcom’s rules on handling customer complaints.
The investigation is part of the communications regulator own-initiative monitoring and enforcement programme on complaints handling pursuant to General Condition 14 .
Ofcom’s investigation over EE found that, over the period investigated – from 22 July 2011 to 8 April 2014 – EE failed to:
- provide certain customers with accurate or adequate information about their right to take their complaint to an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) scheme;
- send out written notifications to a number of customers that should have referenced their right to take their complaint to ADR eight weeks after they first raised their complaint;
- state in its Customer Complaints Code that, where relevant, customers could access its ADR scheme by requesting a ‘deadlock letter’.
Ofcom found that in a number of cases customers requesting deadlock letters were either disregarded or told by EE that letters of this type were not issued.
EE also failed to tell customers they could use the company’s ADR scheme for free.