Customer quality
The reply is approved before the customer sees it
A customer complains. Somebody acknowledges it, decides how serious it is, finds out why it happened and writes back — and that reply goes past a second person before it is sent. Fourteen days later the complaint comes back on its own to ask whether the fix actually held.
What happens to a request
- You
Log it, then acknowledge it
The summary, the detail, which of eight kinds of complaint it is, when it arrived and how it reached you — phone, email, the portal, a sales representative, a letter, social media — with the part number, batch and quantity where there is one. Acknowledging is what makes it visible to the customer: while it is only logged, they see nothing.
- You
Triage it
How severe it is, whether there is a safety or regulatory dimension, and the date by which you are promising an answer. It will not move on until all three are answered, and it names the three it is waiting for rather than refusing in general.
- You
Find out why
Containment first, then root cause, which category it falls in, who was responsible, the corrective actions, and whether you are upholding the complaint at all. If you need something from the customer you can ask, and the question has to be written down before it goes.
- You
Have the reply approved
What you are offering, what it costs and what you are actually going to say all go to a Quality Manager, who approves it or sends it back with a reason. The panel names who is able to approve, so it is never a question of who to chase.
- Customer
Acknowledges what you sent
Confirming records the page as it appeared to them, against their name and the time — so what they were told, and when, stops being a matter of recollection.
- You
Fourteen days later, check it held
The complaint comes back on its own. Whether they were satisfied — including when they simply never replied — whether the corrective action worked, and what you would do differently. Not effective sends it round again.
The reply is not the author's to send
One approval stands between the investigation and the customer, and it belongs to a Quality Manager rather than to whoever wrote it. Sending it back needs a reason. And nobody can approve a letter with no customer on the complaint to receive it — the approval is held rather than quietly allowed.
They never learn it was your supplier
Root cause is shared with the customer; the category it falls in, and the supplier responsible, are not. So they get a real explanation of what went wrong without being handed your supply chain — and what the complaint cost you, and what you gave away to settle it, stays on your side of the line too.
It comes back in fourteen days
Fourteen days after the reply goes out, the complaint moves itself to an effectiveness check. Not a diary note and not a report somebody has to run: the step that asks whether the fix held is in the workflow, and a complaint cannot be closed without passing through it.
What they see starts when you acknowledge
Nothing is visible while it is only logged. From the acknowledgement on they can watch it move without being able to touch it, and the date you promised an answer by is one of the things they can see. How severely you rated it is not.
The step everybody skips
Most complaint handling ends when the reply is sent, because that is the point at which the customer stops asking. This area treats that as the middle rather than the end: the answer has to be approved by somebody who did not write it, the complaint returns a fortnight later whether anyone remembers it or not, and a corrective action that did not work sends the whole thing round again. What closes it is not the apology — it is the evidence that the apology was not needed twice.
Start with it