Examples of short and long-term customer complaint reduction strategies
Hi everyone, we are trying to implement a complaint reduction strategy with both short term and long-term actions. This is what we've wrote initially:
Short term : immediate corrective actions
Long term : re-trianing & re-educating
However, the auditor had commented to mentioned what we wrote for long term is actually a short term strategy. Will need some inputs on this . Thank you !
A good long-term might be adjusting in-place systems, having management meeting (monthly, quarterly, or at least once a year) mentioning this issue and conduct a kind of "root-cause analysis" to bring up the issue, systems at play, and how improvements can be made moving forwards. Meetings from that point on can elaborate on how well you've implemented a strategy or if your plan needs adjustment.
I think frequent enough meetings and documentation (minutes, video recordings, etc.) discussing and implementing efforts in the right direction would be more than enough to satisfy that need/request... but could just depend on your auditor too.
Long-term correction may relate to the frequency of issues causing complaints. You should try differentiating between complaints for issues that are "one-offs" and for issues that keep getting reported. Issues that keep getting reported should be the focus of your long term improvement. It starts with re-training, but should continue further into new systems being put in place to verify that the re-training is effective, or that new QC checks implemented are being done properly. So, try to develop of system for reviewing your customer complaints and determining if process changes are needed as a result of them. Your review will likely be of complaints you've already "closed", you'll just be looking for systemic issues.
Of course, your response to "one-off" complaints does depend on the nature of the complaint. Food safety complaints should always be investigated no matter how unusual or unlikely they seem.
OP: what you've listed as long terms indeed sound like short term solutions which are likely to occur for any single complaint (depending on severity).
When you want to discuss long term, it would start with a trend analysis of what complaints you're seeing. We have our customer service department categorize complaints and rejections into categories (temperature, damage packaging, packaging errors, illness, so on and so forth). We trend the complaints monthly for each of our production facilities, but take a deeper dive at a corporate level to identify plants with higher numbers of complaints, whether a category is recurring at an unacceptable frequency, etc. Any trends that emerge can trigger independent corrective and preventative actions to be taken.
Now, you may review your complaints and find no outstanding trends. You can write it up as such at that time, identifying no long term corrections need to take place. But if you review say, 12 months worth of your complaints, and one glaring type or situation emerges as a significant part of your complaints, then that would be worth performing a full investigation and identifying what changes you can make to prevent it from recurring. Then implement those changes and look for effectiveness via your next trend review.
Hi everyone, we are trying to implement a complaint reduction strategy with both short term and long-term actions. This is what we've wrote initially:
Short term : immediate corrective actions
Long term : re-trianing & re-educating
However, the auditor had commented to mentioned what we wrote for long term is actually a short term strategy. Will need some inputs on this . Thank you !
Hi Yvonneee,
I have been involved in many projects to improve product quality and reduce food complaint levels both in the short term and long term.
Short term improvement is usually made via corrective actions, long term by trend analysis and preventative actions. Have a look an one of my previous blogs on the website:
Using Trend Analysis to Reduce Complaint levels
I use a tool that I developed that I call the “Complaint Analyzer” to assist in identifying areas for improvement. You can get an idea of what this is all about from the images in this pdf:
FS 3.10 Complaints Analyzer Instructions Sample.pdf 2.69MB 37 downloads
The IFSQN also offer Complaint Management & Performance Improvement Training which is great value for $97USD per person, even if I say so myself! :biggrin:
Kind regards,
Tony