Customer Complaints

Customer Complaints

A solid customer complaint program can aid a business in its efforts to improve quality of services and products for consumers. Even the most well-intentioned business will occasionally receive complaints from customers or consumers, so having a plan in place to handle those complaints is beneficial to your facility’s processes.

In this training we’ll talk about how to:

• Use customer feedback to improve performance
• Identify customer complaints that could pose harm to consumers
• Categorize complaints as quality or safety issues
• Investigate customer complaints to identify the root cause or failure
• Assign corrective action to deal with complaints and prevent future issues
• Create a trend analysis
• Adjust any associated programs to prevent customer complaints in the future

Program Components

Complaints can come from customers, or those who handle your products for resell, or the end-consumer. A quality customer complaint program will identify qualified personnel to handle these complaints, investigate potential causes and ensure measures are taken to remedy any broken processes causing repeated complaints.

There are typically seven components of the customer complaint program:

• Assigned responsibilities
• Methods for handling complaints
• Complaint investigation
• Root cause identification
• Corrective and preventive action
• Trend analysis and
• Separation of complaints by type.

Assigned Responsibility

The first step in creating a customer complaint program is to identify the person who will oversee the program. This doesn’t have to be the same person who receives the complaints, but this person will oversee the entire program and analyze results from the program.

In addition to this person, you should identify who will be responsible for receiving the complaints and train them on how to collect data, request samples, and communicate any corrective action to appropriate persons.

Each person involved in the customer complaint program needs to fully understand their role and communicate with one another to make sure all pertinent information is being gathered and tracked. This team of individuals could include managements, line workers or supervisors and each person should have their assigned role.

An outline of responsibilities will become an official procedure for handling complaints, so it’s important to clearly outline all steps and responsibilities for each individual involved in the customer complaint program. Identifying clear steps for handling each complaint will also ensure consistency and accuracy of data collection.

Handling Complaints

First, the person who receives the complaint should gather all pertinent data, including: name and contact information, product involved and any traceability codes, any effects from the issue, such as illness or injury and expectations for remedy of the complaint.

Whenever there is a complaint involving biological, physical, or chemical issues and any illness or injury, then a sample of the product should be requested.

To capture all of this data and make sure data collection is consistent, it’s best practice to develop a customer complaint form that is readily available.

Complaint Investigation

An initial review of all complaints should be done immediately to identify any potential threats from products that are currently on the market. Immediate action must be taken if there is further risk of threat to customers or consumers. Less critical complaints do not need to be handled with such urgency, but still require thorough investigation. 

After an initial review is done to assess priority of a complaint, that complaint should be forwarded to the appropriate person within the plant to continue investigations. The person who completes a more thorough investigation should be familiar with the product and all processes involved in manufacturing a product. 

Root Cause Identification

Handling customer complaints is not just about appeasing the customer. While there are steps you can take to make the customer happy, like giving them free products or discounts, this does not rectify the root cause of the problem. The customer complaint program should identify where the breakdown occurred in the process, which resulted in a complaint occurring. This review should include physical inspections of equipment, reviewing processes, looking at documentation and tracking a product, etc. Essentially you are asking yourself how this problem happened and how it can be resolved to prevent future complaints. 

Corrective and Preventive Action Implementation

Corrective action may be necessary if you find that other product could be at risk or if contaminated products are still in circulation. This may include issuing a recall of a batch of product or having a product returned for reconditioning. Corrective action will be determined based on whether the issue was isolated or if there is continued health risk that could put the business at risk for legal action. 

Preventive action does not warrant a recall of the product but will guide any process changes to enhance quality for future manufacturing. 

Trend Analysis

A proper trend analysis will find commonalities among complaints. This analysis will look at all incoming complaints, how they were handled, what preventive measures were taken or any corrective action to establish any trends. This analysis should be all-inclusive and should be able to identify trends in the facility, even if the products involved aren’t always the same. For instance, if it is found that there is a breakdown in equipment in one part of the facility that resulted in a complaint, then all equipment should be reviewed and inspected. Proper documentation of all actions surrounding customer complaints should be kept and maintained appropriately. 

Separation of Complaints by Type

Separating complaints by type help a facility in identifying trends, as well. Food safety complaints should be separated from service complaints so that each category of complaints can be tracked on their own. Complaint files should be kept separate as well, and all documents should be easily accessible for quality control purposes or audits. This separation of documents is also important if a third party must access your records. You may not want a person who is responsible for ensuring food safety to go through all of your records on service complaints. Some information is not necessary to share with other parties. 

Furthermore, as part of HACCP validation, it is required that food safety complaints be reviewed as a measure of the effectiveness of the HACCP program and that adjustments are made to the HACCP program and/or associated prerequisite programs to address the issue. If complaints specific to food safety are maintained separately it will facilitate this process.