Analyzing Customer Complaints - March 5, 2007

In our workshops, we often challenge the participants with the following question – “Are customer complaints good news or bad news?”

The answer is “Yes.”

The bad news part is something’s amiss. The good news part is that the customers who take the time to complain are giving us two things. 1) They’re giving us a second chance to keep them as customers. 2) They’re giving us valuable data on what needs to be improved.

Note: The vast majority of unhappy customers don’t even complain - they just go somewhere else. We’ve lost them as customers.

When we do get feedback in the form of complaints, the big question is “What do we do with it? Do we analyze it for trends or patterns? Do we make appropriate changes to our systems and processes to prevent those problems from occurring in the future?”

This is exactly what FDA expects us to do with complaint data. Here’s an excerpt from a Warning Letter recently issued to Edwards Life Sciences LLC.

“There is no documentation that the numerous open complaints from 2000 to the present were analyzed to identify existing and potential nonconforming product, or to determine whether corrective and preventive actions were necessary.”

Read the entire 8 page Warning Letter. Go to:
http://www.gmptrainingsystems.com/asp/resources.asp
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