• Doing business with the FSA
  • Small Firms
    • General information
      • Treating customers fairly
        • What is fairness?

We deliberately don't offer a definition of fairness. This is because fairness means different things to different people.

Consumers may also have different values, experiences and expectations through which they interpret what they believe is fair. Take the example of a restaurant – would your expectations differ based on the type of place being visited?

You can see that if restaurants met all these criteria there wouldn't be much cause for complaint.

If you did need to complain, another example of TCF would be the way in which the restaurant dealt with your complaint, taking all the above factors into consideration. If the menu didn’t have clear prices, how many complaints do you think there might be about the bills? And do you think it would be fair to uphold those complaints?

While financial services are different, the principle is the same.

TCF is not just about customer satisfaction. TCF should cover every aspect of your business and include things such as:

• providing training for your staff that ensures quality of advice;
• providing information for customers that is clear and easy to understand;
• ensuring the customer gets the right advice/product;
• meeting customers' expectations;
• putting things right if they go wrong and understanding why something went wrong to stop it happening to other customers; and
• not taking advantage of your customer.

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