Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), UK – Covid Taskforce complaints data pipeline

The Covid pandemic and subsequent impact on business practices and consumers led to a large and sudden increase in consumer complaints to the CMA. A webform was launched to collect complaints using a free text box in which consumers could describe problems such as cancellations of travel or price spikes for essential health products.

The free text boxes were analysed for content and key components such as name of company, sector, type of issue using machine learning. Machine learning was employed to clean the data, infer their content (using natural language processing techniques) which could then be analysed.

This live pipeline of data enabled the authority to track and prioritise issues over time. It also led to the launch of consumer enforcement cases and to track whether the enforcement intervention had decreased the number of complaints in that sector or company.