Bionic Group Complaints Policy

How to complain 

About Bionic 

Bionic is the leading switching service for business essentials in the UK. We help businesses find the right energy, insurance, connectivity, and finance. 

You may have found us online, or we may have called you or visited your premises, or you may have come to us via our partnerships with brands like Compare the Market, Uswitch, Just Eat or Starling Bank. 

What can you complain about? 

Bionic helps customers find and manage suppliers. So complaints can relate to Bionic’s own service or the service of the supplier we switched you away from or to. 

You can complain because you are unhappy with the service you’ve received, or because you feel that you have lost time or money because of a mistake. 

How we’ll deal with your complaint  

We promise to deal with every complaint promptly and fairly. 

We have a dedicated team of complaints agents, who are independent of any other customer-facing team and report to our Chief Customer Officer and Chief Commercial Officer.  

Complaints won’t be dealt with by anyone who is involved in what you’re complaining about.  

We have dedicated processes for identifying, managing, and resolving complaints. 

Our complaints agents will investigate your complaint by gathering and reviewing evidence, for example, website data, call recordings, or emails. 

We deal with complaints as quickly as possible, especially where the complaint is about financial loss that could increase with time. 

If you’re not happy with your complaint agent or don’t agree with their findings, you can ask, and we’ll escalate your case to someone more senior. 

 If the evidence is inconclusive (for example, we don’t have all the relevant call recordings or emails) we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. 

We’ll try to identify vulnerable customers and give them specific treatment to ensure fair outcomes.  

How we’ll keep you up to date on your complaint 

We’ll email you within 24 hours to confirm we’ve logged your complaint. If we don’t have an email address where we can communicate with you about your complaint, we’ll call you within 48 hours to confirm we’ve logged your complaint.

We’ll email or call you every 5 working days to let you know about the status of your complaint and our investigation.

Our complaints agents will respond to your emails or calls within 48 hours.

When we’ve concluded our investigation, we’ll email or write to you with our findings and any offer of redress.

How we’ll record your complaint  

We’ll keep full and up-to-date details of all complaints and related investigations, correspondence, and compensation in our Complaint Log and within the customer’s records on our systems. 

 We’ll keep these records for at least 7 years from the date of the resolution of the complaint.  

We take complaints seriously 

Our aim is, of course, to provide an excellent service to all our customers. Sometimes things do go wrong though. When that happens, we want to put it right for you. In fact, we want to go further and turn a bad situation into a chance to impress you. 

A four-star review of Bionic taken from Trustpilot

Our Complaints Policy is the same across all our products and channels, and meets the highest regulatory standards, including the FCA’s “Treating Customers Fairly” and Ofgem’s “Standards of Conduct”.   

But we don’t just take complaints seriously because of regulation. They are also an important source of customer feedback. Correcting the root causes of complaints helps us improve our service for all customers, and so is key to our business success. 

All our employees know about our complaints policy and know how important it is to follow the procedures in it. If they don’t follow these procedures, they may be disciplined. 

If your complaint is about another firm 

If you complain to us, but we have reasonable grounds to believe that another party is partially or solely responsible, we’ll first record it in our Complaint Log, and then refer you to the other firm within 5 business days, supplying you with the relevant contact details.  

If we can’t resolve your complaint 

If you are unhappy with how we handle your complaint, or we can’t reach an agreement within 8 weeks, then you might want to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). Or you can refer your complaint to the Energy Ombudsman.  

You can do this if you’re a ‘micro business’ - a business that employs fewer than 10 people and has an annual turnover or a balance sheet of less than €2 million. 

You can also refer to the FOS if you’re a consumer; a charity with an annual income of less than £6.5 million and trusts with a net asset value of less than £5 million; or a small business with an annual turnover of less than £6.5 million and a balance sheet total of less than £5 million, or that employs fewer than 50 people. 

These ombudsman services are impartial and free for you to use, and you can contact them via below channels: 

Post: Ombudsman Services: Energy, P.O. Box 966, Warrington, WA4 9DF 
Phone: 0330 440 1624 
Email: enquiry@ombudsman-services.org 

How we monitor complaints 

Our Chief Customer Officer and Chief Commercial Officer review a report about complaints across the Group every month. This includes: 

  • Numbers of complaints 
  • Causes of complains 
  • Timescales for resolving complaints 
  • Upheld and not upheld complaints 
  • Redress and ex-gratia payments 
  • Ombudsman referrals and outcomes 

How we stop complaints happening again 

We don’t just look at complaints individually. We try to correct the ‘root causes’ by looking for any patterns or trends behind complaints and making changes to our processes that should stop those situations from arising in the future.