The complaint was written by AI. The anger is real.
Complaints are arriving longer, more legal-sounding and sometimes quoting rules that don't exist, because customers now ask AI to write them. The UK's ombudsmen are seeing it in the numbers. Here's what it means for a small business, and why the best defence is a website that already says what you promised.
The email arrives on a Tuesday night. It’s four pages long. It quotes consumer law by section number, sets a fourteen-day deadline, and mentions an ombudsman. You run a small furniture repair workshop, and the customer is upset because a chair came back a slightly different shade.
A year ago that customer would have sent three angry lines. Now they ask an AI to “write a formal complaint”, and it gives them something that reads like it came from a solicitor.
That’s not a guess about the future. It’s showing up in the official figures.
What the ombudsmen are seeing
In late October, the head of the UK ombudsman that handles complaints about banks and insurers said AI-written complaints were burying the real problem under pages of irrelevant material. In the most striking case he had seen, 37 of the 39 references in one submission were wrong. Earlier this year, in a small sample of cases, up to a third of replies to the service’s first assessments looked to have been written, or heavily shaped, by AI. Some ran to more than 200 pages in reply to a six-page decision.
The ombudsman for legal services in England and Wales published research in October. It found that 54% of people who had made, or thought about making, a formal complaint in the past year used AI somewhere along the way. That rose to 70% of under-35s. In the complaint files the ombudsman reviewed, about half showed signs of AI use.
Councils, schools and MPs’ offices are describing the same thing. Complaints are getting, in the words of one local government leader, “longer and more complex”.
The chief ombudsman for legal services summed it up:
“AI is rapidly becoming another voice in the complaints process.”
Those are UK bodies, and most of them deal with banks, lawyers and councils rather than cafés and plumbers. But the same tools are on everyone’s phone, and nothing about them stops at regulated industries. If people are using AI to complain to their bank, they’re using it to complain to you.
Why this lands harder on a small business
A big company has a complaints team. You have you, at the kitchen table, at eleven at night, reading a letter that sounds like a threat.
Three things make these complaints tricky:
- They sound more certain than they are. An AI will happily cite a rule, a deadline or an ombudsman that doesn’t apply to your trade, or doesn’t exist. It reads just as confidently either way.
- They’re long. The real problem, the chair that’s the wrong shade, can be one sentence buried on page three.
- They invite a fight. A legal-sounding letter makes you want to reply in kind, argue every point and dig in. That’s usually the expensive way to handle it.
The part worth holding on to
One UK law firm’s guidance to businesses put it simply:
“Behind every AI-generated letter is a real person or business with a genuine grievance.”
The AI wrote the letter. It didn’t invent the disappointment. Someone is unhappy, and they reached for the tool that made them feel least powerless.
The legal services research found something else that’s easy to miss. Among people who used AI to help decide whether to complain, more were put off than were encouraged. So AI isn’t only turning up the volume. For some people, it’s the thing that talks them out of complaining at all.
That’s where your website comes in. When a customer, or an AI helping them, tries to work out what you promised, it can only go on what’s written down. If your returns policy, your timings and what’s included in a job are on your website in plain words, everyone starts from the same facts. If they’re nowhere, the AI fills the gap with general rules. Those may not be the ones you work to.
And the big ombudsman’s answer to 200-page complaints wasn’t a better robot. It was picking up the phone. It’s ringing people more often, because a short conversation finds the real issue faster than a long document does. A small business can do that better than any bank.
The fair question
devkoi builds websites. Is “put your policies online” really a website problem?
Partly, so here’s where devkoi helps and where it doesn’t:
- It can’t write your terms for you. devkoi will turn your own refund, cancellation or deposit rules into a clear page. It won’t decide them, and it isn’t a lawyer. If you work in a regulated trade, or you’re not sure what the law requires of you, ask a proper adviser.
- It doesn’t handle complaints. devkoi doesn’t run a helpdesk or answer customers for you. A contact form on a devkoi site sends messages to the service you choose, or opens the visitor’s email.
- It does keep a record. Every version of a devkoi site is kept, so you can see what your website said on a given date. That’s useful when someone says “but your site said…”
- Building is free; publishing is on the paid plans, starting at $19 a month. Every change comes with a preview link before it goes live.
This isn’t legal advice. Your rights and duties depend on where you are and what you sell.
What to do this week
1. Write down your real policies, in your own words. Refunds, returns, cancellations, deposits, how long things usually take. Whatever you actually do, not what sounds impressive. Then put it on your website.
“Add an ‘Our policies’ page with these rules, written in plain English: [your refunds, cancellations and deposit rules].”
2. Say what’s included, and what isn’t. Most disputes start with “I thought that was included”. One line on each service page saves a four-page letter later.
“On each service page, add a short ‘What’s included’ and ‘What’s not included’ list: [details].”
3. Tell people how to complain to you. Who to contact, how, and how soon you’ll reply. Offer a call. Someone who can see an easy route to a human is less likely to start with a formal letter.
“Add a section called ‘If something’s gone wrong’ with my email and phone number, saying we reply within two working days and are happy to talk it through by phone.”
4. When a long complaint arrives, look for the one sentence. Read it once for the actual problem and write that down in a line. Check any rule it quotes before you accept or dispute it. A trade body, an adviser or the official consumer advice service where you live can help. Then ring the customer, as the ombudsman does. Don’t paste their details into a public AI tool to draft your reply. That’s their personal information.
5. Check your site as an annoyed customer would. Imagine something went wrong with your service. Could you find, on your own website, what you were promised and who to contact? If not, neither can they, and nor can the AI they ask.
6. Keep your site up to date, and keep the old versions. If your policies change, change the page the same day. devkoi keeps every earlier version, so you can always see what your site said when the customer booked.
7. Preview it, then publish. Check the new pages on your phone with the preview link, then publish when you’re happy.
Complaints aren’t new. What’s new is that anyone can make one sound like a lawyer wrote it, in a few minutes, at midnight.
You can’t stop that, and you shouldn’t try. What you can do is make sure the facts are written down where everyone can see them: what you promise, what you don’t, and how to reach a real person. Then, when the long letter does arrive, do what the ombudsman does and pick up the phone.