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Complaints Benchmarking

Most people don’t welcome complaints – except, perhaps, Insight teams. This is because they can be a fantastic source of insight – and they’re probably the most immediate indicator of service or product problems. 

However, the way that complaints are handled varies tremendously from one organisation to another. In our September 2007 issue of 5 Minute Insights, we included an article about the value of complaints as part of the insight process (you can see it at http://cisolutions.co.uk/article_42).
 
Assessing complaints
We’ve recently been approached by a company that wants to benchmark the level of complaints they receive. Brief enquiries suggest that this may also be of value to other businesses. However, benchmarking isn’t straightforward. Three key issues are: 
  • Mass – You need a critical mass before the results could be regarded as valid.
  • Volume – It’s obviously very difficult to benchmark complaints in simple volume terms. It will depend on how they are defined and how they are logged.
  • Sector – The benchmark will also depend upon your industry. For instance, if you are an FMCG company, you might want to log the results in terms of complaints per million items sold. In contrast, a service company would prefer to log them against some other measure of transaction levels. Another complicating factor is that some industries are more prone to complaint than others.
 So can you actually benchmark the volume? Or can you simply benchmark the way in which complaints are handled? Or is the most valuable benchmark the way in which complaints are used as part of the insight process?
 
Learning from complaints
Although complaints have a huge potential value, we have been surprised by how little obvious discussion or comparison of complaint handling takes place. This therefore leaves a question mark about what people would most like to learn in this area.
 
So are you interested? Would you like to benchmark your complaints in your organisation? Do you already do this? What measurements would be of most use to you?
 
Please let us know what you think. Contact us at info@cisolutions.co.uk. If there is sufficient interest, we will look at what can be done and we will consider offering to set up a central confidential service for pooling and comparing results.
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