Credit enquiries

We have a statutory responsibility to assist consumers with their credit reports in a number of countries, including the US and the UK. We aim to discharge these obligations wholeheartedly, and we respond to millions of questions every year.

In the US, these queries are handled by our National Consumer Assistance Centre (NCAC), which received more than 16 million requests for help/credit reports last year, submitted via the internet, postal service and direct telephone calls (see chart). The NCAC provides copies of credit reports to consumers, answers questions from consumers about the information on a report, and communicates with consumers who wish to question or dispute the accuracy of their credit reports. It provides special assistance for victims of identity theft or fraud, for Spanish-speaking customers and for consumers with mixed files. We monitor our service standards (as required under Federal legislation) in a number of areas including the time taken to answer the phone and to deal with a phone query, the time taken to fulfil requests for reports and the time taken to process disputes. In all categories we were 100% compliant last year, generally exceeding the statutory requirements.

Additionally, the NCAC offers self-service options via the Internet and IVR (speech recognition system), allowing consumers to manage their own report queries. Consumers can request a credit report or dispute information 24-hours a day, seven days a week without intervention from customer service representatives if they wish. Roughly 90% of consumers choose self-service options to request their credit reports, and almost 50% choose our state-of-the-art self service options to initiate an investigation of information with which they disagree.

In the UK we have an obligation to provide statutory credit reports for consumers who write to us (via letter or e-mail) on the payment of a nominal fee (currently £2). Last year we supplied more than 500,000 such reports and provided more than 200,000 written responses. In addition we also encourage consumers to call us, something we are not required to do by law. Our Consumer Help Service handled more than 600,000 phone calls last year, allowing consumers to check, and if necessary, challenge, the data held on their records, by phone. We carry out regular customer satisfaction surveys to help us improve the service we provide to the public. In October 2006, a survey of consumers who had contacted us to query information on their credit reports revealed that 90% of respondents rated the service they received from Experian as either good or excellent.

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