SAN DIEGO — Daniel Earles, national manager for enterprise compliance at Toyota Financial Services, coined a new word, “Yelpification,” to compare how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau manages consumer complaints on the CFPB database to Yelp, a web site consumers mostly use to post dumbed-down restaurant reviews.
The CFPB’s Disclosure of Complaint Narrative Data policy was finalized in March.
Earles closed out the first day of the Auto Finance Risk & Compliance Summit here on Monday, along with Dan Bickmore, senior vice president and chief compliance officer at General Motors Financial Inc., with a presentation on complaint management and processing.
Like other newly coined words associated with social media, Yelpification can be a noun or a verb, like Tweet or Google, he said. Earles said jokingly that’s something “all new words should aspire to.”
“Yelpification” got a laugh from audience members, but Earles had a serious point to make about the CFPB’s finalized policy, which is intent on making consumer complaint narratives public.
The CFPB portal has publicly tracked consumer complaints on its website since 2012, Earles said. The new policy would allow consumers to “opt in and publish the narrative of their complaint.” Companies can then choose to respond, but they can only respond using one of nine different “canned” responses, he said. The CFPB chose the method in part to protect consumer privacy.
The dilemma that remains, Earles said, is that not all complaints can be addressed by the nine options. Therefore, companies must choose between a response that doesn’t fit, or no response at all.
The bureau has also proposed replacing the current dispute function with a two-part feedback process in which consumers rate the company’s response on a scale of one to five, and then provide a written description in support of the rating. However if the consumer gives a low rating under this process, the written response opens the door for yet another complaint, Earles warned.
In March, the CFPB said that it will not publish any consented-to narrative for at least 90 days after the policy’s publication in the Federal Register, in order for companies to learn about this new system.
All consumer complaints, and how the companies responded, are publicly displayed on the CFPB’s website, and all auto finance-related complaint information is also shown in real-time, on autofinancenews.net.
Make sure to check back on AFN.net for continuing coverage of this year’s Auto Finance Risk and Compliance Summit.
