Read the CCform Public Final Report
Project Background
The CCform project is funded by the European Commission under its Information Society Technologies programme (ref IST-2001-34908). The aim is to develop an online, multilingual complaint form and best practice business process. With CCform, consumers will be able to make complaints in their own language, then the form will be translated into the companies’ preferred tongue. Consumers will be able to track the progress of their complaint, and, if necessary, escalate their grievance to a dispute resolution service or regulator.
CCform can be used by any company doing business by eCommerce, distance selling or local retail operations. They can use CCform as an efficient, stand-alone service or make larger savings by integrating CCform with their own customer care applications.
Look at the CCForm Project Overview
The Consensus Building Phase
The project was launched at the Kick-off Meeting in December 2002. Since then over 70 participants from across Europe and beyond have worked on CCform, including representatives from large companies, SMEs and consumer organisations, as well as legal experts and software researchers. They met in Topic Panels, spending six months discussing and perfecting the process and the form, working together to build a consensus on CCform and the best practice rules.
The consensus building phase culminated in the Final Workshop, which took place in Brussels on 11 June 2003, when each topic panel presented its findings.
Finalising the User Guides and Complaint Form
The project is now completed. Draft versions of the two User Guides, one for the complainant, one for the recipient, were circulated among the members of the project for comments. These documents set out the advantages and rules of the CCform, and explain how to use it.
The finalised User Guides and Code of Conduct have been translated into all eleven official languages of the EU by ETC, a translation company -
- Danish - Code of Conduct,Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers.
- Dutch - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide,FAQs for Consumers.
- English - Code of Conduct,Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers.
- Finnish - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers.
- French - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers. German - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers. Greek - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers.
- Italian - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers.
- Portuguese - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers.
- Spanish - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide, FAQs for Consumers. Swedish - Code of Conduct, Company User Guide,FAQs for Consumers.
The demonstration complaint form can be viewed at CCform. This form is designed to demonstrate and validate the process discussed and agreed. This complaint form is the standard one, and companies will be able to personalise it according to their needs.
The Benefits of CCform
For Consumers
- Free of charge.
- Fill in the form in your own language and the company reads it in its own (except for freetext boxes).
- Follow the progress of your complaint.
- Information on consumers’ rights.
- Help framing your complaint so that it gives complete information in a structured way.
- Alert contact address enables you to make known any problems which may arise during the complaint resolution process.
- The same complaint channel for any kind of problem against anybody in Europe.
- Quick and easy to use.
- Trustful tool, controlled by a Committee of Surveillance.
- Ease of escalation to an ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) in case of unresolved complaints (faster and avoids repeating the complaint).
For Companies
- Opportunity to personalise the CCform core complaint form by adding specific questions (in conformity with the Code of Conduct and Extension Rules)
- The company emails the complainant to notify them of a time frame within which it will respond to a complaint. The Company decides the number of days in which it commits to propose a solution. No specific time frame is imposed by the Platform.
- Increased e-trust e.g. by making sure that the call centres (outsourced), which are located outside of the EU while using the complaint form respect also European legislation.
- Support e-sales while providing an alternative channel for customers to complain.
- Access to data, which are easy to handle even manually for the customer service, as the form is pre-built with the relevant sections
- Support pre-defining problem categorisation and (re)organising complaint management systems. Well structured complaint process gives protection to companies and avoids escalation.
- Access to statistics on the complaint process relating to product categories, and benchmarking within the same profession.
- Economy of scale for SMEs who benefit from the latest research in ontology.
- Cheap: few personal costs, few/no translation costs, low fees.
- Easy to implement.
The Future
The final versions of these user guides and complaint form (thanks to different scenarios) were presented at the CCform Launch Conferences, which took place in January 2004 in Brussels, the Hague, London and Paris.
The project partners are now keen to implement the results of the project, and a number of companies and organisations have expressed their interest in using the CCform system for their own complaints management. A CCform Association has been created to exploit the results of this project. Contact CCform
FEDMA
Avenue de Tervuren 439
1150 Brussels
Belgium
Tel: +32 2 779 4268
Fax: +32 2 779 4269
Email: info@fedma.org
