Customer complaints provide an important measure of how well the quality System is performing.

By accurately
recording customer complaint types, a supplier can objectively measure changes in their management system and
show improvements in a process. Customer complaints may also show trends that have not been identified during
processing and normal process control checks.

Customer complaints may be the first record that an auditor asks to review when beginning the facility audit.
Customer complaints can provide an auditor insight into the performance of the suppliers SQF System and any
trend areas that may require greater focus.

The GFSI recognised standards do require auditors to take a close look at complaints, complaint levels and trends in
customer complaint levels. They are a key performance indicator and are a reflection of the effectiveness of the food
safety and quality management system.

I have been involved in many projects to improve product quality and reduce food complaint levels. One of the best
tools for indicating where action for improvement needs to be applied is by analyzing your complaint data
appropriately.

Whilst you can identify faults in your factory your customers are your 100% inspection service so respect their
feedback. Whilst all of your customers will not complain when they find a problem so you will not capture all of your
product faults you will however identify trends.

The first step is to collate all of your complaint data. Your data should then be categorised by product type,
complaint type and size. Analyzing complaints by numbers alone will not give you a real picture of your
performance. What you need to know is the proportion of complaints you are getting for each product. By far the
most practical way of doing this is by using the sales volumes to calculate the proportion of complaints you get for
each product. Some people use weight or volume such as complaints per tonne or 1000 Litres. My preference is to
use complaints per million units.

So you analyze your complaint data product type, complaint type and size per million units. From this data you can
easily spot the worst performing product lines.

You should then analyze the results for the worst performing products:

Are they all the same size?

Are they produced on the same filling machine/production line?
Is it the same type of complaint?

The answers to these questions will generate your corrective action plans. If products with the highest complaint
levels are all the same size it could be a particular problem with that size of packaging. If it is all the same type of
complaint then why are some product lines worse than others? If product from one particular production line is
generating the highest number of complaints per million units then there must be a reason for this, it needs
investigating. You should compare product performance and if there are significant differences you should ask the
question why?

At this point complaint trends are useful. For example when I worked with fresh pasteurised milk sour complaints
were higher in larger sized containers. The reason for this was not related to the quality of the product but the fact
they took longer to consume and spent more time in and out of the fridge. Such products would be targeted for
improvement projects as opposed to corrective action to remedy a problem area.

A few words of caution though, your analysis needs to take into consideration the comparative value of the products
and the market. People are more likely to complain about higher value products. Also some retail customers are
much better at reporting complaints from customers to the extent that I used to get 10 times the complaint levels
from one particular retailer compared to another for exactly the same product.

My last tip the more data you analyze the better. In the past I have analyzed 3 years worth of data. Why? It gives a
year on year performance so you can see if things have been improving or deteriorating and also it shows any
effects of seasonality. For example it is not reasonable to compare summer levels of off complaints on a fresh
product with winter levels. This is why in the Northern Hemisphere I would compare August complaint performance
with the complaint levels for August in the previous year.