Treating Customers Fairly

Treating customers fairly

Acorn Business Centre is a Trading Style of Acorn Group Ltd, referred to as Acorn Business Centre are committed to treating all customers equally and fairly.

We believe, you as our customer have a right to be informed about how we operate our business and what we are doing to provide you with the highest level of service. The purpose of this communication is to explain the standards of conduct that you can expect from us. Our regulatory body, The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), adopt a principle based approach to treating customers fairly and have 6 key guidelines which we follow:

1. Customers can be confident that they are dealing with firms where the fair treatment of customers is central to the corporate culture.

2. Products and services marketed and sold in the retail market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.

3. Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.

4. Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.

5. Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.

6. Consumers do not face unreasonable post-sale barriers imposed by firms to change product, switch provider, submit a claim or make a complaint.

How do we ensure that our customer expectations and standards are met?

We run our business in an open and transparent environment and expect all our staff to be professional and courteous at all times.

We have a very low turnover of staff at Acorn Group Limited, this is because we spend a good deal of time and investment in our people. All our team are carefully selected and trained to a high standard. We monitor and track performance and service levels on a regular basis and because we all work together in an open office environment, the management team are on hand to monitor and assist our team in delivering consistent levels of service to you.

How do we communicate with you?

It is important to ensure that a clear and open line of communication is available at all times. An operator will always be available during normal office hours to assist by telephone and customers are always most welcome to visit our premises to discuss any matter.

We strive to provide our customers with simple, user friendly documents that provide clarity to the services we offer. Any changes will be communicated with as much notice as possible and if there are any material changes to the original order, fresh paperwork will be raised to avoid any confusion.

Our customers expect all our paperwork to be clear and simple to understand, which is why we review our processes on a regular basis, with a view to improving service levels.

Marketing

We aim to keep all promotional campaigns relevant to our customers and endeavour to not bombard with material that will not be found useful. We also ensure that all pricing and detail of service is clear and concise. Not all of our communications are sales related either. We also send information material, particularly when there are industry changes that might be relevant or of interest to our customers. At all times, we aim to provide information in a clear and understandable format.

What we are doing now:

We want to keep it simple and make it as easy as we can for our customers to contact us, which is why we’ve added additional sales support staff to assist customers with all general business queries. We are committed to answering every single incoming call to the building within 5 rings, which we believe we successfully achieve. We aim to respond to all emails and letters within 24 hours, in most cases we succeed in doing so and continue to monitor response times and to look for ways to improve our processes and service.

We like to think that we get it right first time, most of the time. In the event that something doesn’t quite go as planned, we will act quickly and diligently to put the matter right. We receive very few complaints, but we understand there has to be a robust mechanism in place to deal with such matters and we have

adopted a simple complaint handling process, which is available on demand, or can be viewed on our website.