In this guide, we outline the best approach to handling customer complaints in the food production industry - embracing every opportunity for continuous improvement.

Working within the food production industry, it would be a surprise if the words “customer complaints” didn’t evoke a strong reaction. After all, every complaint has the potential to highlight an issue with your process and an area in need of change.

However, this doesn’t have to be a negative thing. With the right mindset, customer complaints can strengthen your site’s commitment to continuous improvement, helping you to show auditors and customers alike just how skilled your team is at taking corrective action.

To provide support in this area, we have produced a guide covering the five key areas of handling customer complaints:

Contents:

BRCGS Requirements for handling Customer Complaints

Customer Complaints and Company Culture

Retailers or Food Service Providers

Customer Complaints and Trend Analysis

Investigating Customer Complaints

Acting on Customer Complaints

BRCGS Requirements for handling Customer Complaints

Customer complaints will play a central role in your site’s audit inspections. After all, it is common for auditors to use Customer Complaint Records to gather valuable insights relating to the areas in which your factory needs to improve.

It is also worth noting that in Issue 9 of the BRCGS Global Food Safety Standard, it is made clear that “BRCGS reserves the right to conduct its own audit or visit to a site, once certified, in response to complaints or part of a routine compliance activity to ensure the integrity of the scheme.” What’s more, the nature and volume of the customer complaints received at your food factory could impact how much of your audit BRCGS is willing to conduct remotely (if applicable).

With this in mind, it’s vital that analysing, investigating, and resolving customer complaints is an integral part of your audit preparations. You should start by working through the following clauses:

Clause 1.1.4

BRCGS auditors will expect to see evidence of regular management review meetings, with a clear record of the evaluation of any customer complaints and the resulting action points.

Clause 2.12.2

When evaluating the effectiveness of your site’s HACCP plan, one of the main verification activities should be the review of any customer complaints.

Clause 3.10.1

Customer complaints should be recorded and investigated, with “actions appropriate to the seriousness and frequency of the problem” taken by the relevant team members.

Clause 3.10.2

Data needs to be analysed for significant trends. If there is a spike in complaints, opportunities for improvement should be identified through root cause analysis.

Clause 9.2.4

Finally, Clause 9.2.4 highlights the importance of effectively managing customer feedback relating to product packaging. It asks that an ongoing review of the packaging process is carried out, with one of the defined performance criteria listed as customer complaints.

Access your copy of the BRCGS Global Food Safety Standard

Customers (Retailers or Food Service)

Along with your auditors and the customers that will eventually be consuming your product, you will also need to think about the customers you supply. When reviewing the performance of your site, Retailers and Food Service Providers will start with the number of complaints your product has received. Typically, this will take place at least once a month, but complaint numbers could be reviewed on a more frequent basis.

Generally, Retailers and Food Service Providers will assess complaints in relation to CPMU (complaints per million units). This ensures it is a level playing field across their supplier base, taking into account the number of complaints received vs the volume of goods produced.

If a high level of complaints is flagged on the Retailer’s or Provider’s internal system, it will be their own technologists held accountable for ensuring action is taken and any poor performing suppliers swiftly bring issues under control. If your site is called to attention in this way, you could be at risk of unannounced visits, a halt on NPD (new product development), a request that your team visits a customer’s HQ to explain any issues, and even the loss of your current business to suppliers with a better performance record.

Customer Complaints and Company Culture

Before you get to work on addressing the feedback directed towards your factory, it’s important that you evaluate the way in which customer complaints fit into your company culture.

Are they viewed as a positive opportunity for continuous improvement, the inspiration for open and honest discussions about how key processes work at your site? Or, are they seen as the start of a witch hunt, with operatives scared to come forward with their perspective, unable to trust there won’t be undue blame or repercussions?

The solution is to embrace the value of customer complaints, starting from the top down. Your Senior Leadership Team needs to promote a culture of care and curiosity – encouraging team members at every level to get involved with the process of analysing, investigating, and resolving complaints.

It’s also important that every department is represented at meetings regarding this topic, otherwise you could be missing out on valuable insights. Additionally, there needs to be a clear chain of command when sharing outcomes relating to customer complaints. Your operatives need to know exactly what changes are being put in place and who is responsible for each point of corrective action.

As the former Chief Officer for Safety and Quality at Pladis Global, Denis Treacy is a huge advocate for setting positive objectives within the food production industry. To learn more about his method for establishing a positive culture of curiosity, innovation, understanding, and flexibility, watch our recent webinar on: The Power of Positivity.

Watch: The Power of Positivity, Driving Predictable Food Safety Outcomes

Customer Complaints and Trend Analysis

When carrying out a trend analysis of customer complaints, the first step is to collect all the relevant data. You will then need to sort this data in relation to the following three factors:

1. Which product is featured in the customer complaint?

Identifying the product featured in the complaint should be simple enough, as this information will be included on the original Customer Complaint Form.

2. Which type/category does the customer complaint fall into?

For this step, you will need to establish key categories such as foreign body contamination or spoilage. Then, you can introduce subcategories relating to factors such as the type of foreign body reported or the signs of spoilage flagged by your customers. Examples include:

Category Subcategory Example
Foreign body contamination e.g. glass, plastic, paper, cardboard, hair A piece of plastic found in a bag of salad.
Illness e.g. allergic reaction, food poisoning A customer experiencing stomach pains after eating a prawn sandwich.
Spoilage e.g. mold, odour, discolouration Fresh vegetables displaying an unexpected yellow colour.
Quality e.g. unpleasant taste, lack of taste A flavoured cracker with a plain and underwhelming taste.
Quantity e.g. underweight, overfilled An apple crumble with a surprising lack of apple pieces.
Packaging e.g. evidence of tampering, broken seal Milk cartons leaking due to a broken seal.
Labelling e.g. no label, unclear label, incorrect date A chocolate bar that doesn't have a suitable use by date.

3. What is the scale/severity of the customer complaint?

When establishing the scale and severity of your customer complaints, you will need to work out how many complaints each product receives over a pre-determined time period (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, monthly). Then, you will need to relate this number to a pre-determined unit of measurement (e.g. number of units sold, tonne of product sold, thousand litres of product sold).

This information will help you to identify which of your products require corrective action. If you base this judgement solely on the number of complaints, you could end up focusing on a product that receives 20 complaints per week, but spread across 50,000 units. This compared to a product that receives 15 complaints per week, but spread across just 1,000 units.

Investigating Customer Complaints

One of the best ways to investigate customer complaints is to adopt a traffic light system – arranging complaints into green (acceptable), amber (cause for concern), and red (requires immediate attention). The “acceptable” level of customer complaints will vary from site to site, but
it is likely that your auditors and customers will expect to see an improvement every year.

As you investigate your customer complaints, you will need to address a wide range of questions, including, but not limited to:

  • Are customer complaints higher for a specific retailer or store? Could this have something to do with the way they are handling or storing your product?
  • Are there any seasonal trends that you should prepare for year on year? E.g. a spike in spoilage complaints during the hot summer months.
  • Is the number of customer complaints higher for products made on the same production line or in the same area of your site?
  • Are there any products that are receiving an especially low number of customer complaints? Is this a positive sign or could this be due to unclear complaint instructions on the product label?

Positive trends should also be investigated, so you and your team can recreate key wins. Say you notice a decrease in customer complaints following the introduction of new production equipment, it might be that another area of your factory could also benefit from new equipment, especially one with a high number of foreign body complaints.

You may also find that a customer complaint doesn’t call for corrective action, but rather an improvement project. For example, if your site receives an influx of complaints relating to a chocolate bar not containing the right amount of caramel filling, this could indicate a growing demand for chocolate bars with more filling in every segment. Using this information, you could either update your product recipe or hand the matter over to your site’s NPD Team.

Acting on Customer Complaints

Once you have analysed, and investigated your customer complaints, the next step is to
establish a Corrective Action Plan that, in the words of BRCGS, reflects “the seriousness and frequency of the problem.”

For example, if you identify a rise in complaints surrounding foreign body contamination for all products made on the same production line, you will need to conduct a root cause analysis to find out what is going wrong in this area of your site. You will also need to inspect the relevant equipment and machinery. Say a high number of the complaints reference broken pen parts, you may need to switch to shatterproof, detectable pens. Or, if customers are complaining about broken bristles, it might be that your hygiene brushes need to be replaced with a more durable design. Alternatively, if metal pieces are being found in your product, it would be advisable to evaluate your site’s current approach to metal detection.

So there you have it, a guide to handling customer complaints in the food manufacturing industry. We hope it has highlighted the importance of finding the value in customer feedback and viewing each complaint as an opportunity to improve.

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