How often is everyone reviewing their customer complaints?
I'm trying to put together a better Customer Complaint policy. I am wondering how often everyone is reviewing their customer complaints? Is quarterly too often? Is bi-annually not often enough? We're not SQF Certified yet, so I'm just trying to build a solid program that can be practiced effectively and not have to be revamped after the desk audit.
I just had my SQF desk audit last week. I have an annual review with senior management of all customer complaints. Besides that, any complaint related to a deviation from a CCP has to be reviewed within 7 days.
I hope that helps.
Good luck with your audit
During your SQF Audit, you will need to have prepared a customer complaint trend analysis, this could come out from your annual management review meetings. Now during your food safety/haccp meetings and/or internal audits, customer complaints are always a good topic to discuss. These can form to make your trend analysis that is discussed at your annual MR meetings. Hope that helps!
Monthly in our food safety & quality meeting. Complaints are discussed with root cause analysis and CAPA implementations (as needed). We also trend our customer complaints using CCPM as a metric.
I think the frequency really depends on the number of complaints you receive, validity of the complaints, and severity of the complaints. In former companies we've discussed and tracked them weekly (there were that many and the valid ones had to be weeded out), and in another company yearly because there were few to no complaints.
At least monthly during our management meeting. I have also been holding a meeting specifically to address complaints once every couple of weeks. Luckily our complaints are down now, so I've been able to cancel some of those meetings. We have a goal of completing the investigation & closing out the complaint within 14 days.
So at my company we dont really get complaints. I feel very lucky because in my past job they would receive a lot like 5 a week. So I wouldnt know how to do a trend or analysis on no complaints lol it would be very boring.
Hi MW,
Minimum annually as part of the management review.
Depends on your number of complaints. I assume there is some escalation procedure within the complaint process ensuring the sensitive ones get dealt with almost immediately and that they get closed out within their own timeline.
Part of the decision needs to be based on your own work efficiency. Are you just signing off a stack of 10 complaints? 20?
How many are you getting per year? Per quarter?
Just do something that allows for the max time you want to wait before reasonably reviewing complaints - but falls within a time-frame that ensures your customers are happy and protected.
-Josh Heinrichs
I'm trying to put together a better Customer Complaint policy. I am wondering how often everyone is reviewing their customer complaints? Is quarterly too often? Is bi-annually not often enough? We're not SQF Certified yet, so I'm just trying to build a solid program that can be practiced effectively and not have to be revamped after the desk audit.