Services Standards: Defining the Core Consumer Elements ... - ANEC

5. Post-contractual stage
Services Standards
The picture drawn from the EC directives and regulations is ambiguous. Aftersales
services are largely set aside, rules against insolvency protection are
relatively well-developed. Complaint handling and dispute settlement shows up
in most of the directives and regulations, but are in no way linked to already
existing more fully developed concepts, which can be found in
Recommendations 98/257/EC on out-of-court settlement and 2001/310/EC on
consensual resolution. Astonishingly enough some areas even contain rules on
collective redress, though in rudimentary form.
One might have expected that the post-contractual stage could become a major
field of activities of standardisation. This is partly true, however, much less so
for after-sales services than complaint handling and out of court dispute
settlement. Contrary to the official EC policy to foster out of court dispute
settlement, however, the standards put much more emphasis on in-house
complaint handling. This goes along with the policy behind the Service
Directive. On the other hand there is little preparedness to protect consumers in
case of insolvency of the service provider.
6. Monitoring and inspection
EC directives and regulations do not scrutinize monitoring and inspection
duties. If there are any, they can be found not in the directives and regulations,
but in codes, guidelines and recommendations elaborated by coordinating
committees or informal cooperation of national agencies. The exception to the
rules is the Service Directive. However, this is due to the fact that the Directive
is build on the interplay between binding law and voluntary standard-making.
The concept of best practice suggests the need to organise a constant learning
process, via evaluation of customer satisfaction and mechanisms for taking
corrective action. Whilst the standards under review are still far away from the
draft ISO DIS 10001 on ‘Quality management – customer satisfaction –
guidelines for codes of conduct for organisations’, there is an obvious tendency
to take a much harder look at the practical effects of the relevant standards, on
the management of customer satisfaction via inquiries and on the need to take
corrective action. Again, this is a tendency, but clear-cut rules are missing in
most technical standards.
7. Consumer representation
Whether and to what extent consumer organisations have been heard in the law
making process remains largely outside the scope of the analysis. The survey
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