Your Complaint

This information summarises POIS’s, a part of Foresters Friendly Society (who are the regulated firm) complaints procedure. It is designed to help you understand how we will deal with your complaint

What we do for our members

POIS is committed to giving you the service you need. If you tell us about a problem, we’ll try our best to put it right. We appreciate your feedback as it can help us to improve our future service and products. When contacting us with your complaint we will, wherever possible, take action to resolve the issue.

Contacting us with your complaint

To help us address all your concerns quickly and accurately, please give us full details of your complaint, provide us with any supporting documentation and let us know what we could do to resolve the matter to your satisfaction. You can complain by telephone, letter or email – whichever is easier for you. There is no charge for raising a complaint.

Complaint procedure

When we receive your complaint we will either:

• Resolve your concerns immediately and respond or 
• Send you a written acknowledgement within five working days stating the details of the complaint to show that we have full understanding of the complaint and will therefore take the appropriate course of remedial action.

In some circumstances it may be possible for us to provide a final response to a complaint with our acknowledgement letter

Within eight weeks of receiving your complaint we will either:

• Issue a final response or
• Tell you why we are not in a position to provide a final response and indicate when we expect to be able to do so.

Final response

Within eight weeks of receiving your complaint, we will issue a final response.

On receipt of a final response or on reaching the eight week point, we will tell you about your option of referring your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service if you remain dissatisfied with our response.

If you are satisfied with our final response, you need take no further action.

If you feel we have not addressed all your concerns in our final response, please tell us what we can do to resolve these to your satisfaction, before approaching the Financial Ombudsman Service. 

The Financial Ombudsman Service

The Financial Ombudsman Service provides an independent and free service to consumers. Their role is to settle disputes between financial businesses and their customers.

The Financial Ombudsman Service will not normally review your complaint until we have issued our final response or until eight weeks have passed since we received your complaint. Referring your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service does not affect your legal rights.

We will, at the appropriate time, inform you when you may refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service and will send you a consumer leaflet that provides contact details for the Financial Ombudsman Service and tells you about the service they provide.

If you refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, you should do so within six months of receiving our final response.

Alternative Dispute Resolution

When consumers have a problem with a service they bought, they can settle their dispute out-of-court through an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedure or, if carried out online, an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) procedure. Resolving disputes through ADR/ODR, in general, is easier, faster and less expensive than resolving disputes before a court.

Our Alternative Dispute Resolution provider is the Financial Ombudsman Service as detailed above. If you wish to use the Online Dispute Resolution procedure to resolve a dispute, you can access this service here.