The Cost of Having Rights: Why a Consumer Complaint Is a Question of Justice, Not Customer Service

A customer attempts an online booking, receives no confirmation, and finds that the support form requires a booking number that was never issued. No one has rejected the claim; the procedure cannot even receive it. This paper argues that such failures are not merely problems of customer service. They raise a question of justice. When a business controls the ordinary route through which consumers assert contractual rights, it bears responsibility for the avoidable and disproportionate burdens created by that route. The paper calls this principle procedural responsibility. Survey data show that the anticipated effort of complaining is a common reason for doing nothing. Among consumers who experienced a problem but took no action, 57 percent expected complaining to take too long and 43 percent expected it to be too complicated (Consumer Conditions Scoreboard 2025). European and German law address parts of this problem, and Spain's 2025 customer-support law demonstrates that legislators can establish specific procedural duties. Yet a coherent cross-sector standard for accessible, traceable and substantive complaint handling remains missing in EU and German law. The paper proposes five rights: reciprocal communication, a continuing case record, human reconsideration of unresolved claims, timely handling of urgent matters, and access to relevant evidence. It also outlines proportionate remedies for objectively established procedural failures that do not require another exhausting complaint. The goal is not to guarantee that consumers win disputes, but to ensure that their claims can be received, examined and meaningfully decided. The principle applies from letters and call centres to chatbots and AI agents, offering a concrete direction for the European Commission's planned Digital Fairness Act.