2. Download complaint data
To dive deeper into complaint trends and get complete control over aggregating and charting complaints — including by company — you’ll need to download complaint data, and then perform analysis using software like Excel. Performing queries on downloaded complaint data is the best way to answer complex questions, and offline analysis has been the basis both for our own research, as well as for academic studies using advanced statistics methods.
To download complaint data, start by filtering data as needed, and then click “export data” near the top of the screen. This will create a pop-up dialog box asking if you’d like to download only those complaints for which you have filtered, or download the entire dataset of complaints. It’s often better to download a subset of complaints, as the full dataset is a large file size, and as previously noted contains conflicting category names resulting from changes made in April 2017.
3. Use Frontier Group’s CFPB data tool
Finally, you can view and download aggregated complaint data through Frontier Group’s new CFPB trend data online tool.
This tool was built using the Consumer Complaint Database API, which taps directly into the CFPB’s database and allows anyone with some programming know-how to build applications that can go beyond the capabilities of the official database website and provide users with new ways to access complaint data. Unfortunately, the API also lacks some important options, like the ability to aggregate complaints by company.
The data tool is a work in progress, so please let us know if you have feedback, either by creating an issue on the project’s GitHub page or by sending an email. The CFPB’s API itself is also under active development and you can provide the CFPB with feedback, too.
Tips for looking for complaint trends:
- When aggregating and comparing complaints by state, consider looking at per capita complaints.
- Aggregating complaints by zip code can be a powerful tool for spotting geographic trends. However, note that for privacy purposes many complaint zip codes are only available with the first three digits, depending on zip code population and whether the complaint includes a published narrative. For GIS mapping purposes, a shapefile of 3-digit zip codes is available here.
- Consider combining keyword searches and trend analysis. For example, in one recent blog post we looked only at complaints containing key words related to COVID-19.
The CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Database is a powerful tool for understanding the problems consumers face in the financial marketplace. But it’s also both ripe for improvement and frequently threatened with removal from public view. The more people that use it — and the more people that publicize the tool’s utility and write to the CFPB with suggestions — the better off we will all be.