However, many of these unfortunate incidents can be avoided by using a customer service and complaint program. It’s possible that you already have one as part of a comprehensive food safety procedures.
Customer complaints may serve a productive purpose for your firm. Companies that listen to their customers effectively make complaints a component of their process improvement program. This article aims to help you better understand relevant food manufacturing standards and how you can use customer complaints to improve your risk profile.
An Overview of Relevant FDA and ISO Standards
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires food manufacturers to establish and follow quality management systems to ensure their products are of consistent quality and meet required specifications, known as current good manufacturing practices (GMPs).
Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the regulations found in Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations, food manufacturers are responsible for ensuring their products are safe, sanitary, and labeled according to current federal requirements.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9000 family of standards provides guidelines and principles for quality management systems. ISO 10002:2004 offers guidelines for complaint handling as it relates to products.
Challenges with Evaluating and Reporting Customer Complaints
Although the customer complaint process may seem straightforward at first, many businesses find it challenging. Here are the two main reasons you may be struggling and possible solutions.
- Confusing customer access: Your customers may not know how to report a problem. Not only is a delay discouraging for customers, but the longer it takes for you to know about a problem, the longer it takes to correct it.A solution is to provide an easy-to-find link on your website, a toll-free helpline, or an email address for your customers to use.
- Customers provide incomplete data: You can’t follow up on a complaint if you cannot reach the customer to find out more information. Since complaints are often made through a variety of channels (email, phone, text, social media comments, etc.), it can be difficult to collect the required contact information. One solution is to use an automated software system built to handle this information and store it centrally.
What Does an Effective Customer Complaint Program Include?
Complaints are a part of all food-related businesses, and they can’t be avoided. However, your organization must be responsive to these complaints to produce a safe product and be compliant with government regulations. In addition, manufacturers need to have a plan in order to maintain good relationships with customers and retail partners.
Depending on the complaint’s seriousness, an FDA investigator may visit the individual who made the complaint, collect product samples, and begin inspections of the food site.
Complaints that are less serious in nature or appear to be isolated incidents are carefully monitored. The FDA may send an inspector to identify problem areas in a production plant and discuss the complaints with company management.
That’s why it is essential to have a trusted system in place for identifying, collecting, and analyzing data. An effective customer complaint handling system should have the following components:
- Identification of all potential causes of the complaint
- Complaint data collection, including name, date, and contact information
- Investigation and root cause analysis
- Steps for corrective action
- Complaint analysis
- Steps for continual improvement
Our Woodruff Sawyer team also offers the following tips for handling customer complaints:
- Centralize the reporting of dissatisfied customer complaints internally.
- Implement internal policies and procedures to handle minor, more frequent claims.
- Make every effort to resolve a complaint directly with the dissatisfied customer before elevating to the carrier. For example, you could reimburse the customer for the product or offer coupons or gift cards with a signed liability waiver.
- Triage the claims and have a set of criteria (such as a dollar amount threshold) to use during evaluation.