FCC Federal Communications Commission : Rosenworcel Statement on FCC's New Consumer Help Center

STATEMENT OF

COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL

Re:

FCC Consumer Help Center: A New Consumer Gateway (January 29, 2015)

In everything the Commission does, consumers come first. Yet if in the past you spent

any time with our consumer complaint forms you would have reason to question our

commitment to this mantra. Clunky, hard-to-decipher, and brimming with the special charms of

the turn-of-the-millennium Internet-they left a lot to be desired.

But now change has come. Thanks to the good work of our Consumer and Governmental

Affairs Bureau and IT team, we have a consumer platform that is modern and easy to use.

This is good-and important. That's because every year the Commission receives

hundreds of thousands of consumer complaints and inquiries. That means hundreds of thousands

of consumers take the time to reach out to air their grievances, seek guidance, and ask questions

about services that are so essential in modern life. We owe them a simple interface, an easy

interaction-and we owe them answers. Our new Consumer Help Center platform is going to

make this possible. Even better, this platform is less expensive to maintain than its predecessor

and will in the near term more than pay for itself.

But it gets better. Over time we will be able to take the information we glean from this

new platform and use it to inform our policies and update our rules. That makes good sense,

because we have a treasure trove of information from this process and in an age where we can

slice and dice data like never before, we should make better use of what we have to do more to

make sure consumers come first.