EU Consumer Protection Cooperation Network (CPC) – live complaints from consumer organisations to enforcement alerts

The CICLE project is part funded by the EU Consumer’s Programme and consumer organisations OCU in Spain and Altroconsumo in Italy. CICLE aims to feed regular information to consumer protection enforcement authorities to fill in the gap of EU market surveillance and promote cooperation between consumer organisations and the authorities in the Consumer Protection Cooperation network under Regulation (EU) 2017/2394.

It maximises the potential of consumer complaints by improving the consumer-facing platform interface, and at the back end, creating a common framework of sectoral classifications. Complaints can be much more easily classified and mapped and eventually, there will be new capacity for a live tracking tool to generate alerts to authorities and detect trends relating to product types or companies.  A further iteration of the platform in the next phase of the project from 2023 onwards will include an AI based tool that will automate the classification of complaints and cases and more quickly detect cross-border problems.