Customer complaints benchmarking

Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows of a benchmarking tool that I can use for complaints data. I have just joined our companies complaint task force and am trying to understand the data being produced. Currently we are measuring ourselves against complaites last year, however no one can tell me if last year was a good or bad year.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Bowmank

I just use Excel for trending and analysis of things like that.  I set up tables for the data and tabs for years then on a different tab I have it graph and chart the data.

Thanks for that, however I am realy looking for data that is industry wide rather than within our business. I wondered if such a database exisits that collects like for like food manufacturing companies...

If your supplying one of the big retailers, you will have been set a CPMU target by your technologist.

This will be your overall CPMU target.

Some retailers report their top 5 / 10 complaints each week, and that gets circulated to all of their suppliers.

If you don't supply a retailors (in that it's not their label) then you have to decide this target for yourselves. Be realistic about it. There is no point setting yourself a target of 5 CPMU when your complaints are running at 30.

By trending your complaints, you should be able to identify areas of potential weaknesses and use that as part of your continuous improvement plan to reduce the complaints/ incidents

Hope this helps

Caz x

You may want to check out Tony C's recent blog post and perhaps ask him for the mentioned complaint analyser tool..

If your supplying one of the big retailers, you will have been set a CPMU target by your technologist.

 

This will be your overall CPMU target.

Some retailers report their top 5 / 10 complaints each week, and that gets circulated to all of their suppliers.

 

If you don't supply a retailors (in that it's not their label) then you have to decide this target for yourselves. Be realistic about it. There is no point setting yourself a target of 5 CPMU when your complaints are running at 30.

 

By trending your complaints, you should be able to identify areas of potential weaknesses and use that as part of your continuous improvement plan to reduce the complaints/ incidents

 

Hope this helps

 

Caz x

Hi Caz,

We do supply 3 UK based retailers and I do have the CPMU data, but that seems to be very high. I just wondered if there was something like the HSE has for accident data, but for food complaints. I guess that I have to accept that we are doing well if we are well under our CPMU targets then...

Thanks for this.

Template.xls   379KB   239 downloadsI got this template from Toney on this forum.  Hope it helps!

The problem with this is that people are reluctant to share their complaints.

Some accidents your obliged to report to HSE. I bet they don't have every accident that's happened (as we've never had a RIDDOR, I've never been asked to submit my accident data to the HSE)

Caz

I use excel as well and look at complaints per million units produced, instead of just a number of complaints. This helps put into perspective how we are truly doing, rather then saying "wow we had 10 complaints this week, and only had 3 last week .. what's going on?!?" when the reality of the matter is that we were shut down half of last week and only produced 500,000 units, and this week we ran overtime and produced 2.5 M units.

We also categorize the complaints by type of complaint (foreign object, taste, size, etc.) and then trend by type as well as line to determine if there are bigger issues.

We use a excel for our complaints recording, we look at complaint by WTD (Week to date) MTD (Month to Date) and YTD (year to date) by each product type and fault type and also compare these to the previous years. we look at the DPMO (Defects per million opportunities)  by product and overall. 

For each year and fault type we look at what percentage that fault type is for the total complaints for the year. 

I agree with Caz, My favorite phrase, "That information is proprietary."  

Imagine what that would do to companies and overall consumer behavior if all customer complaints were to become public. How would we know the numbers are honest? How would false claims be handled (reported or not?) Who justifies if it was a false claim in order not to report?

I won't buy from there! They had a complaint of a person that found a Band-Aid in their food! [Even though it was skin tone color rather than a metal detectable blue Band-Aid which is all that is used in the plant] <~~~~would this be placed on the foot notes? Most media will just read on the Headline (Which is the only part most people read) CUSTOMER FINDS BLOOD IN FOOD and somewhere in some obscure small font writing at the end of the article. It was actually some strawberry flavor topping. 

Like most people in this thread suggest, make your own charting log and trend. Most GFSI schemes require this and also require some sort of quantifiable way to show you're continuously improving in some food safety facet which can be easily done with trending last years complaints versus this years.