4. Incident management
Management of complaints
A robust system is essential, to ensure that complaints are logged, investigated, and trended to prevent recurrence.
This article is written to meet the following sections of the Standards:
| BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9 | 3.10.1 Complaint-handling documentation and action |
| BRCGS Packaging Issue 6 | 3.12.1 Complaint-handling documentation and investigation of complaints |
| BRCGS Agents & Brokers Issue 3 |
3.8.1 Complaint handling documentation and action 3.8.2 Complaints relating to service providers and suppliers |
| BRCGS Storage & Distribution Issue 4 | 3.10.1, 3.10.3 Complaints handling |
| FSSC22000 Version 5.1 | No specific section, intention is within ISO22000:2018 9.1.1 General (monitoring, measuring, analysis and evaluation) 10.1 Nonconformity and corrective action |
| IFS Food Version 7 | 5.8 Management of complaints from authorities and customers |
| SQF Edition 9 | 2.1.3 Complaint Management |
The requirements
Receiving complaints
All complaints must be recorded, investigated and the results of the issue recorded, where sufficient information is provided.
There must be a clear process for customers to raise legitimate complaints about products and services.
All complaints need to be captured through one single system, to ensure they are all recorded, adequately assessed, investigated, and the results of the investigation recorded. Investigation must be completed within a defined timeframe and feedback provided to the complainant wherever contact details are provided.
Complaints procedure
A documented complaints procedure is required and a standardised complaint form.
Where traded products are supplied, every effort should be made to ensure that complaints raised are relayed to the complaints department at the manufacturing site. This information should be relayed through third parties, such as agents where necessary. Where a complaint hasn’t come via the customer, the customer must be informed.
Complaints must be handled by appropriately trained staff to ensure that the severity, and therefore the significance is identified.
Tampering complaints
The complaints procedure must detail how suspected malicious contamination complaints must be handled. This must include a reporting and escalation process.
Non-conformances
Investigation must be completed within a defined timeframe and feedback provided to the complainant wherever contact details are provided.
Non-conformances must be raised where the fault is found to be due to non-conforming product.
BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9
There are no direct changes within Issue 9 that impact this subject.
Investigation
Complaints must be handled by appropriately trained and competent staff to ensure that the severity, and therefore the significance is identified.
The investigation must also be completed by competent staff.
Competency
For staff who investigate complaints they need to:
- Be trained.
- Be collaborative.
- Have the right mindset.
- Be inquisitive.
Trained
Complaints handling staff must be trained on the procedure.
Collaborative
Solving complaints needs to be a team effort, which means the person who is leading the investigation needs to include the right people. The skill is knowing which people to include at the right time.
Mindset
Having the right mindset towards complaints, is a key attribute – to ensure that complaints are investigated in a really robust manner.
A complaint must always be seen as legitimate and that the businesses will take ownership of it, instead of ‘passing the buck.’ Also, using the philosophy of ‘guilty until proven otherwise’ means that the investigation will look for why it went wrong. Rather than looking for reasons why it didn’t go wrong.
Looking for problems will result in a much more detailed investigation.
Inquisitive
When investigating complaints, you need to put your Sherlock Holmes hat on and become a detective. Things are not always as they may seem.
Here’s an example from my experience…
A complaint was received that looked like a piece of yellow plastic. The plastic had been reviewed by the management team who had concluded that there was no such plastic on site and therefore it hadn’t come from their site. When I reviewed the plastic, it looked like there was a shape or edge to it, but I couldn’t tell properly as it had product stuck to it. So, I decided to wash it, so I could see better. As I washed it, I found it got smaller. It turned out it was a boiled cough sweet…
Trending
Complaints must be logged and trended. The trending must then be reviewed to establish if there are trends. Where a trend is highlighted, root cause analysis must be carried out to establish suitable preventive actions, to drive improvement.
The analysis shall be made available to relevant staff and may include graphical displays on staff noticeboards or discussion at routine operations meetings.
Pivot tables are an awesome way of trending complaints, if you’d like to use them here are some step-by-step instructions.
Want to implement this topic into your QMS?
This article is a topic within the subject of continuous improvement. If you’d like compliant documentation for your management system on this subject, we recommend you purchase our pack.
Continuous Improvement
Pack 3: Continuous Improvement eDocs
This pack includes simple, yet perfectly designed systems for managing all aspects of continuous improvement. It includes an internal audit programme for both system audits and GMP inspections. The non-conformance system provides a simple solution for assessing whether corrective action is sufficient, or if root cause analysis is needed to determine preventive actions. You even get the Techni-K root cause analysis method (smart analysis), so you can train your team and start driving improvement. Where things do go wrong, you’ll know exactly what to do as you’ll be able to follow the defined routines for non-conforming product, returns, complaints and stock write off.
Finally, you’ll be able to use all of that great information that you’ve collated, to trend and review it – so that you can preempt and prevent any problems which may be heading your way.
Thank you for this article – it was very helpful. The pivot table guide is great – I’m not great with excel and a lot of our complaints data I save manually into excel so trending can be a bit time consuming. I will definitely give the pivot tables a go to see if it makes life easier!
Great article Kassy, thanks
The guide to pivot tables is really handy; I never did understand them!
I saw your comment and checked out the guide – that is helpful.
I use pivots in some spreadsheets but others (like complaints) have got manually created tables which take some tweaking when I have to add a product or customer. To be honest I hadn’t thought about making them into Pivots.
One day, when I have time I’ll definitely Pivot that one!
Thank you for the guide, I’m going to put it on the system so others can access it as well.