Every complaint has a deadline. Who is keeping an eye on it?

A customer brings back a water heater that leaks. The person at the counter takes it, writes a phone number on a scrap of paper and says “we’ll be in touch”. The heater goes off for repair. The repair shop keeps its own records, the store keeps its own. Ten days or so later the customer rings to ask what is happening, and nobody can answer straight away. Not because anyone is careless, but because no single place follows the whole journey.

Stories like this don’t always end badly. But when they happen several times a month, the business loses customers who were perfectly willing to stay, if only someone had got back to them in time.

A complaint is not a message, it is a case

Without a system, a complaint is handled as correspondence. An email arrives, a call is made, a message goes out. Correspondence has no status, no owner and no deadline. That is why it goes missing.

A case has all three. You know who opened it, what exactly the customer wants — a repair, a replacement, a refund or a price reduction — who holds it right now, when it has to be resolved, and what was decided in the end.

As long as a complaint lives as an email in someone’s inbox, it is exactly as reliable as that person’s memory and holiday schedule.

Where complaints usually go astray

At the way in

The same business takes complaints at the counter, over the phone, through the general inbox, through a sales rep’s personal email and via a message to a driver. Each of those routes ends somewhere different, and some end nowhere.

At the handover

The store hands over to the repair shop, the repair shop to the supplier, the supplier back to the repair shop. At every handover the question is the same: did anyone confirm receipt, and with what details?

While waiting for someone else

The case sits idle, waiting for a repair report or a supplier’s reply. Nobody noted when to chase it, so it sleeps until the customer calls.

At the money decision

A refund or a credit note needs someone’s approval. The approval is given over the phone, nobody records it, and accounts only find out when the customer asks why the money hasn’t arrived.

What has to exist, whatever software you use

• One place of entry. However it arrived, a complaint gets a number and is logged in the same place. The customer gets that number and knows what to quote.
• An owner at all times. It is always clear who has the case. When it is passed on, the handover is visible.
• A deadline you can see before it passes. The reminder arrives a few days early, not afterwards.
• Evidence attached to the case. A phone photo of the damage, the receipt, the repair report — on the case, not in someone’s camera roll.
• A recorded decision. What was approved, who approved it and why.
• Closed means finished. A case is only closed once the customer has been told and the accounting entry is done.

Two clocks running at once

When the customer is a private individual, a timely answer is not merely good manners: consumer protection law sets rules for how complaints are handled. Check with your lawyer or accountant exactly which deadlines and duties apply to your business, then put them into the system as rules, not as a reminder in someone’s head.

In wholesale there is a second side to the story. When a pallet arrives with damaged goods, the business has two complaints at once: one to the supplier and, often, one from the customer those goods were meant for. If your contract with the supplier sets a window for reporting damage, that window runs from delivery, not from whenever someone finds time to write an email. Report it late, and you pay the difference.

That is why the two cases should be linked. When one is resolved, you immediately see what it means for the other.

What automation actually does here

It does not decide instead of people whether a complaint is justified. That remains the job of someone who knows the product and the customer. What gets automated is everything around that decision:

• assigning a number and confirming receipt, whichever route the complaint came in by
• a reminder to the owner before the deadline
• the handover to the repair shop with all details and photos, without retyping
• a proposed credit note to accounts once a refund is approved
• an overview of open cases by deadline, so the most urgent come first

Complaints as data for purchasing

After a few months of tidy records, you can see something that was invisible before: which product, which supplier and which delivery come back most often. That gives you facts to put in front of the supplier, rather than impressions.

Where to start

The first step does not need a big system. One place of entry, an owner and a deadline already change a lot. Reminders come next, followed by the link to the warehouse and to accounts.

Complaint handling is a good place to start: the work has clear edges, a deadline, and the benefit shows immediately. How work like this is introduced step by step is set out on our business digitalisation and automation page. If you would like us to look at how it works in your business today, write to us.