CQ Guide: Don’t Just ‘Manage’ Complaints, But Derive Insights from Complaints Data

Complaints Data: A Gold Mine

“Ugh! That’s yet another complaint we need to deal with. This is really bad.”

“Ah! The data from this complaint is extremely valuable. Yes, I agree we should have avoided it. But this data point is going to help us build a much better product over the long run.”

These were very different reactions from two medical device manufacturing leaders at the same company. One of them looked at the complaint with a negative mindset. He was justified. The product defect should have been caught before it reached the customer, and more importantly, before it affected the end-user. In the short-term, a complaint is certainly bad news. It affects the reputation and trust a company has built through several years of dispatching quality products into the market.

Yet, sometimes, mistakes happen. And they have to be handled with the right frame of mind. That is where the approach adopted by the second quality leader comes in. Okay, the problem has happened. But, what next? How do we capture data, facts and information about the complaint and put it through a well-designed CAPA and RCA process? Using complaint data the right way – with a positive mindset of long-term, continuous improvement – will certainly help with overall quality performance.

Better Complaint Handling: Direct Impact on Customer Experience

For business leaders and marketers, the phrase “customer delight” is not new. But, customer obsession is slightly more. It refers to how each and every aspect of what a customer is saying and experiencing about your product or service makes a big difference to your internal operations. It needs to be captured and acted upon.

The loyalty of customers lies with those who not only provide them with a quality offering but also with the ones who respond very quickly when things go wrong.

While enterprises are certainly aware of this need to deliver high-quality customer service at all times, for some reason they are unable to operationalize this. Specifically, companies often struggle to do the following:

• Act swiftly to resolve a complaint and deliver a solution to the customer.
• Prevent repeat occurrences of the same mistakes.
• Using complaint data for risk management.
• Take corrective and/or preventive actions with agility.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders -- across teams -- to resolve complaints.
• Derive insights for the future from complaints data.
• Collaborate with a supplier, when resolving a complaint requires their support.
• In regulated sectors, handling regulatory submissions around complaints is also a challenge.

The only way to do this right is to embrace automation and digital transformation. A well-designed complaint management workflow, coupled with a flexible, scalable, and cloud-based complaint management solution is a no-brainer in today’s context.

12-Steps to Better Complaints Handling

Businesses can manage their complaints workflow from intake to remediation and continuous improvement using ComplianceQuest’s Complaints Management solution, part of the EQMS solution built on the robust and scalable Salesforce platform:

1. Businesses receive customer complaints and feedback from various touch points such as website, mobile app or phone call, which is recorded and routed for further triaging using ComplianceQuest’s In-take feature.

2. Complaints are automatically queued and the relevant complaint coordinator/manager notified for further action using Triaging and Initiation.