20 business days to answer a mediation request, silence counts as refusal — the reform France is preparing for SME customer service
On 6 March 2026, the French Finance Ministry published its 10-year review of consumer mediation (nearly 210,000 requests in 2024, up 25% since 2022). The revised EU directive, to be transposed into French law by March 2028, will require businesses to respond within 20 business days to any mediation request — silence will count as a refusal to enter mediation.
The press release is clear about what's changing: today, a business can leave a complaint unanswered with no formal consequence before the consumer turns to a mediator. Tomorrow, silence itself becomes an act — read as a refusal. For a multi-site agency network with no dedicated customer service desk, that changes the nature of the risk: it's no longer "we'll answer when we can," it's a clock that starts running from the written complaint, agency by agency, case by case.
AppH's Pack Accueil never decides a dispute and never negotiates any mediation on the agency's behalf — that stays a human decision, entirely. What it can do: timestamp every complaint received at the front desk or in chat, track the response deadline per case and per agency, and flag it before the deadline instead of after. Across a 30-agency network, that's the difference between a tracked dashboard and an informal reply lost in a shared inbox.
For AppH
- Per-case deadline tracking already exists in Pack Accueil's logic (contract renewals, KYC) — extending it to customer complaints is a natural extension, not a new module.
- A multi-agency network with no centralized customer service is exactly the profile that loses the most to a clock running silently, agency by agency.
Against / the honest limit
- The reform isn't yet transposed into French law (deadline March 2028) — nothing is mandatory today, only the principle is settled at EU level.
- AppH doesn't mediate anything and doesn't draft the substantive legal reply: it flags the deadline, the agency remains solely responsible for the content of its response.
This number stands out to us: 85% of mediations that run to completion end in an agreed solution. The real risk for a small structure isn't mediation itself — it's missing the deadline before mediation even starts, a blind spot a simple automated tracker closes without touching the legal substance.
Reviewed by a human at AppH