Customer Complaint Industry Standard

Hi everyone, I was analyzing the previous year customer complaints for CPMU (Complaints Per Million Units and it is the number of complaints received and divided by total sales for the year times one million) at our bakery. I wondering if there is a standard level for the customer complaints in the industry? What acceptable levels of customer complaints are? How can I set improvement targets to reduce certain types of complaints and measure my progress and performance. What is the right % of costumers reduction complaints from year to year should I consider? Thanks Tresa

Greetings Tresa,

To my knowledge there is no standard formula or right level of reduction. In a perfect world you should have zero complaints meaning 100% reduction!!! However there are a few "rules" you can apply as appropriate.

First of all you have to filter out the complaints to relevant and irrelevant to food safety and/or quality. For example if you get complaints that your product doesn't taste like papaya, but you don't do anything like that, then it's an irrelevant complaint and you should just file it away (if you want for pure OCD reasons you can just register how many of those you get).

For the relevant now you should do an evaluation of how serious they are and what is their impact. For the serious (that can affect public health, the product having a wrong use-by date etc) you need of course a 100% reduction. For non-serious you can set up let's say a 10% or more reduction of complaints every year, be advised though that quality is subjective, some may like it some may not and some might just want to complaint for sport...

The above mentioned are rough examples to give you an idea. Bottomline is there is no specific rule (unless of course you want to go all pro and use marketing tools and statistical analysis for every single detail, which move a bit away though from the food safety part) and you need to do an evaluation of the importance of the complaints your receive and deal accordingly.

Regards.

I would agree, it depends what the complaints are for.   Also, are the legit?   Many of the complaints I've received in the past are the customer not understanding something, or making a mistake on their end, and to me, that doesn't count.  As far as number, it depends on your size too, no?   I used to get 4-5 per year when I started my current job about 13 years ago.   I haven't had one in maybe 5-6 years?  

I would agree, it depends what the complaints are for.   Also, are the legit?   Many of the complaints I've received in the past are the customer not understanding something, or making a mistake on their end, and to me, that doesn't count.  As far as number, it depends on your size too, no?   I used to get 4-5 per year when I started my current job about 13 years ago.   I haven't had one in maybe 5-6 years?  

I work for flavor company, almost all of our complaints are customers making a mistake when using our products and then complaining that it doesn't taste right.  We don't count these because they aren't an issue with our product, they are user error.

I would agree, it depends what the complaints are for.   Also, are the legit?   Many of the complaints I've received in the past are the customer not understanding something, or making a mistake on their end, and to me, that doesn't count.  As far as number, it depends on your size too, no?   I used to get 4-5 per year when I started my current job about 13 years ago.   I haven't had one in maybe 5-6 years?  

We had a customer complain 13 weeks after the EXPIRATION DATE-------dude it has EXPIRED what did you think was  what a waste of time and energy

Greetings Tresa,

 

To my knowledge there is no standard formula or right level of reduction. In a perfect world you should have zero complaints meaning 100% reduction!!! However there are a few "rules" you can apply as appropriate.

First of all you have to filter out the complaints to relevant and irrelevant to food safety and/or quality. For example if you get complaints that your product doesn't taste like papaya, but you don't do anything like that, then it's an irrelevant complaint and you should just file it away (if you want for pure OCD reasons you can just register how many of those you get).

For the relevant now you should do an evaluation of how serious they are and what is their impact. For the serious (that can affect public health, the product having a wrong use-by date etc) you need of course a 100% reduction. For non-serious you can set up let's say a 10% or more reduction of complaints every year, be advised though that quality is subjective, some may like it some may not and some might just want to complaint for sport...

 

The above mentioned are rough examples to give you an idea. Bottomline is there is no specific rule (unless of course you want to go all pro and use marketing tools and statistical analysis for every single detail, which move a bit away though from the food safety part) and you need to do an evaluation of the importance of the complaints your receive and deal accordingly.

 

Regards.

I really appreciate your input. so then I will consider a reduction of 10% for complaints for this year. does it make sense?

We do our customer complaint goal as a % reduction yr/yr.  I think your plan is sound

What I've done is categorize each complaint by whether it is a valid or invalid complaint.  If the complaint is valid, is it a one off issue, or does it require some correction or corrective action.  Usually, you will get one off valid complaints, or invalid complaints.  It is up to you to judge how you see the complaint as valid, invalid, one off, or requiring some correction or corrective action.  You can have a team talk through this and discuss how to define each category.

Once you've filtered your complaints to the valid type you can then calculate your CPMU based on the sales data.  If you don't have history you can start to gather your history now, and if you have historical complaint & sales data you can use that as well to calculate historical CPMU based on what you've defined.  There is no standard, but if your process is "six sigma" your deviations should be less than 3.4 per million which is considered world class.

What I've done is categorize each complaint by whether it is a valid or invalid complaint.  If the complaint is valid, is it a one off issue, or does it require some correction or corrective action.  Usually, you will get one off valid complaints, or invalid complaints.  It is up to you to judge how you see the complaint as valid, invalid, one off, or requiring some correction or corrective action.  You can have a team talk through this and discuss how to define each category.

 

Once you've filtered your complaints to the valid type you can then calculate your CPMU based on the sales data.  If you don't have history you can start to gather your history now, and if you have historical complaint & sales data you can use that as well to calculate historical CPMU based on what you've defined.  There is no standard, but if your process is "six sigma" your deviations should be less than 3.4 per million which is considered world class.

I appreciate your input. can you explain more about ""six sigma" deviations should be less than 3.4 per million which is considered world class"?

I appreciate your input. can you explain more about ""six sigma" deviations should be less than 3.4 per million which is considered world class"?

Having a process that is capable of maintaining within a six sigma range will have less than 3.4 defects per million.  Six sigma process is considered a world class process.  Therefore, if you can keep your CPMU below 3.4 you can consider your process as meeting a world class standard.

However, it is up to you and your team to decide your targets.

Six Sigma is a LEAN manufacturing approach which requires extreme rigor (but oh so worth it (I have my green belt))

So if you used that approach, you'd need to analyze (well, someone would (probably a black belt)) what is CAUSING the issues and then fix those

Basically, you can imagine lowering to CPM, but until or unless you've addressed the actual root cause, it's really just pie in the sky

"Six Sigma is a method that provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation helps lead to defect reduction and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services."

Complaints don't you just love them?  I agree with what is being said here, first you need to break apart the complaints as plant assignable or not.  Deal with the plant assignable complaints and then you have to determine if you can make a fix to your process or not and is it worth it?  Our complaint ration is 0.25% but our plan for this year was 0.23%, so we get corporate communication asking what we are going to do to improve our number.  We tell them what we need but the costs are sometimes staggering.  I wish I could get only 5-10 complaints a year like some of your comments have stated.  But our product is prone to complaint for quality to dark, to light, too much salt etc... A point off and some one tends to complain along the way.  

But we endeavor to persevere.