What To Include In Your Complaint Management Reports

Managing complaints well is integral to the success of any business, in particular those with a strong customer facing proposition. In too many cases, organisations find themselves taking a fire fighting approach to complaints, dealing with each complaint as it comes in and judging success on the basis of complaints handled without taking the time and trouble to treat complaints as they should be treated – as a valuable business resource and learning opportunity.

The Upside Of Complaints

Complaint management is about more than controlling the damage caused by a problem. Used properly it can be a means of leveraging vital information, particularly around the areas of customer requirements and expectations. In many cases the knowledge of how customers felt let down, coupled with sufficient detail of what it took for them to accept that a complaint had been adequately dealt with, can offer insights that no amount of market research could ever hope to provide.

The Importance Of Reporting

The key to complaint management being turned from a reactive means of dealing with things that have already gone wrong into a proactive tool for preventing problems and establishing better working methods and systems lies in how the complaint management systems are reported. Every complaint is a rich source of potential data, but only if what you might call the anatomy of that complaint can be fully captured and analysed. At their best, complaint management reports are all about pinning that data down in a way which enables two different ways of viewing the complaints management procedures of an organisation.

The Detail Of Complaints

The first of these ways of viewing the complaints management process is in terms of detail. That means breaking the handling of a complaint into its component parts – from receiving a complaint through to signing it off as having been successfully resolved, and then onto the learning that can be taken from that resolution. Each stage of the process can then be analysed in depth through the simple expedient of gathering real time data on what is being done to deal with the complaint, who is doing it and when they are doing it.

The Overview Of Complaint Management

The second way in which complaints can be viewed is more overarching in nature, and involves pulling together the data on each individual complaint to build an understanding of the wider trends relating to aspects such as the nature and type of complaints you receive, changing customer expectations, and the impact of outside forces on the complaints being processed. The last of these would apply to those cases in which an organisation suddenly finds itself dealing with complaints around an aspect of delivery which had previously been subject to very little, if any, customer dissatisfaction. The normal response might be to analyse working practices in an attempt to discover the aspect of delivery which is suddenly failing in some way.

The Detail Contained In Reports

The complaint management reports produced by Workpro, however, include one which consists of detailed Case Overview which, as well as covering basic information such as when a complaint was received and the number of days it has been open, has details of the nature of the complaint. This, allied to the fact that Workpro enables users to cross reference linked or related cases, will make it easier for a pattern to be identified, such as a particular process not being followed and driving a spike in a specific type of complaint. Once a pattern of complaints of this kind has been identified an organisation can take steps to deal with the overarching issue, as well as handling multiple similar complaints in a constructive and consistent manner.

KPIs

One of the most important benefits of comprehensive complaint management reporting is the fact that it enables tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) around complaints. It also makes it possible to look at the granular details of your complaint management processes and decide which KPIs need to be tracked in addition to the most obvious.

The standard metrics which need to be tracked across any complaint management processes include the following:

The time it takes to resolve each stage of the complaint handling process – while it may be tempting to only track the time taken for complaints to be fully resolved, this will deliver an incomplete picture of how your complaint management processes are working. More valuable information can be gleaned from complaint management reports which refer to specific stages of the process. The time it takes for each complaint to make its way through specific stages of your process will enable you to identify sticking points across complaint management as a whole, and also to easily divide and analyse simple complaints which don’t need to be handed on to a specific team to be dealt with, and the more complex complaints which do.

In some cases, compliance with the relevant legislation will mean that a complaint needs to be escalated within a set number of days of being received. Detailed reports broken down into specific stages of the process will make it easier to track compliance of this kind.

The time it takes to respond to complaints – as with the example given above, the response time when complaints come in needs to be broken down across the relevant stages of the process to deliver a holistic view of how your complaint management systems are operating. How long, for example, does it take the front-line complaints team to respond to customers getting in touch, and if the complaint is of a nature that warrants being passed on to specific members of the team, how long does it take them to reach out?

The point of granular detail of this kind being presented via easily accessible reports is that it becomes simpler to track not just the raw response times but also the context within which that response is taking place. You may find, for example, that a higher than expected percentage of cases which need to be passed on through the process are stalling at a particular stage of that process (i.e. when being handed to members of a particular team). Through the detail presented in your complaint management reports you can see that the members of the team are responding to the complaints promptly upon receiving them, reaching out to customers and asking for more details. You can also see that the issue which is causing the bottleneck is that customers often need to provide further evidence to support their complaints, and waiting for this evidence to arrive is what is causing cases to stall. The answer to this could be as simple as instigating automated reminders to customers who need to provide evidence for their complaint, or it could involve implementing systems which make it easier to provide that evidence, such as standard templates or a dedicated portal.  

Outcomes – on a very basic level the outcomes of the complaints you receive will flag up the effectiveness of your organisation’s delivery as a whole, but complaint management reporting which makes it easier to analyse outcomes at each stage of the process can deliver more granular and valuable data. On the most basic level, data showing that a particular department has more than 45% of the complaints made against it upheld would indicate that it would probably be worth reviewing how that department operates to try and identify any systemic issues.

Looking at the data on outcomes across the various stages in more detail, however, will make it possible to track the effectiveness of the complaints process in its own terms. If a very low percentage of complaints are upheld after being escalated to a particular stage of the process, for example, it could indicate that the team handling complaints at this stage is failing in the task of gathering the evidence needed to uphold genuine complaints. While ‘only 1% of complaints upheld’ may seem like a temptingly positive outcome, it could prove to be damaging if many more complaints ought to have been upheld but weren’t because of failings in the process. Not only will it be impossible to learn from mistakes that have been made in the past if those mistakes aren’t admitted, results of this kind could see customers with legitimate reasons to complain feeling poorly dealt with and, on the most basic level, disinclined to ever do business with your organisation again.  

Reporting As An Embedded Part Of The Process

The key to effective complaint management reporting, as delivered by Workpro, is that the reporting aspect of complaint management, rather than being an adjunct or afterthought, is built into the system from the ground up. In simple terms, every complaint – and the process of investigating and resolving that complaint – delivers masses of data direct from your customers to you. Complaint management reports are the means via which this data is leveraged for insights into everything from the goods or services you deliver and where things are going wrong, to how proactive your various teams are when it comes to dealing with complaints which have been passed up the system to them.

The standard complaint management reports produced by the Workpro platform include the following:

As a list alone it represents a comprehensive overview of the complaint management process, but it’s in the detail provided within the separate reports that a tool like Workpro comes into its own. The nature of that detail ranges from the date and type of complaint, who it was made by and when it was responded to, up to a holistic review of complaints across departments and assigned to individuals to respond to.

The Importance Of Presentation

The presentation of the data is as important as the detail contained within it. The use of various visual and graphic techniques means that the data can be presented in a way that is the most practically useful and easily assimilated. The techniques used across Workpro complaint management reports include the following:

Real Time Reporting

One final component of highly effective complaint management reports is that they are created, updated and accessed in real time, i.e. as and when complaints are being processed. While reports which are created after complaints have been resolved can be incredibly useful in offering a top-down, back to front overview of a set of complaints over a specific time frame or within a specific department of a business, reports which track complaints as they make their way through the processes in place can provide granular detail and the ability to pinpoint good or bad aspects of those processes as they happen.

The use of complaint management reports to track and fine-tune delivery shouldn’t be confined to departments tasked specifically with handling complaints. Instead, by being created in an accessible and easily interpreted manner, the best reports can be utilised by all parts of a business to turn problems into insights and complaints into solutions.