Key Points

• Turn complaints into data-driven insights.
• Optimize your processes and eliminate waste where you can find it.
• Build a culture of continuous improvement.

Just because you’ve got a slew of customer complaints doesn’t mean things are hopeless.

Obviously, something needs to change in how you’re conducting daily operations. You can take gradual steps toward operational excellence, however.

You might already be sticking to methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma, but you just need the right sort of push to go a step further.

So, if you can feel that customer satisfaction slipping, don’t fret. We’re going to go over some solid practical strategies to get things back on track and with lasting results.

Today, we’re taking a look at continuous improvement initiatives that stick and how to implement them.

Data and Analytics

The best thing you can do with customer complaints from the start is to stop treating them as isolated events. If they gather up, something is going wrong. As such, you need to take the time to gather metrics and perform some more in-depth analytics to get to the bottom of things. Before we dive into our next point, I’ll stress the importance of categorizing complaints as you receive them.

It can be tempting to just file things away under general complaints, but you’ll want clearly defined categories for the next few steps. At the bare minimum, this will highlight certain trends in your current production output more readily.

Centralized Databases

All customer complaints can be filed into a centralized database or even a spreadsheet to log everything. Pertinent information like the date and time of the complaint, customer details where necessary, the nature of the complaint, and whatever details are provided can be crucial to understanding what is going wrong.

Further, if you’ve provided any sort of resolution, make sure to note this as well. If it takes weeks to address a problem, that is a core issue that will be the target of future continuous improvement initiatives.

Pareto Analysis

Making use of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, to identify the core recurring issues that are causing the vast majority of your customer complaints can act as a beacon on where to place your focus. Usually, according to this principle, you’re looking at 20% of the problems causing 80% of the complaints. By leveraging that previously mentioned database, you’ve got the metrics you need to determine what is going wrong and where.

Root Cause Analysis

With major problem areas identified, it’s time to start looking into more robust problem-solving tools. Thankfully, there is no shortage of root-cause analysis tools to get you to the bottom of an issue. While you might have identified the problem, you don’t know the exact cause of why this is happening. You can certainly make use of something like a Fault Tree Analysis, but this is primarily recommended for high-risk or high-impact problems.

Useful Tools

The two main root cause analysis tools to keep in mind are the Ishikawa diagram and the 5 Whys.

Ishikawa diagrams, or fishbone diagrams, are visual aids meant to organize potential causes into categories. When looking at complex processes, this helps to single out what contributing factors might be leading to customer complaints.

The 5 Whys is a little more simplistic in its approach, with users merely asking why 5 times until they reach the logical conclusion of a problem. For simpler processes or broader categories, this can be a boon as it allows you to drill down and start the process mapping detailed in the next step.

Process Mapping and Optimization

With your root causes identified, you’re ready to start mapping out processes. Process mapping is a fairly exhaustive means of visualizing every step of a process, from an order being placed to the item being received by a customer, as a general example. You want to identify every individual step, accounting for handoffs, decision points, and areas where errors or bottlenecks can arise.

Processes can drift out of spec over time, which is completely natural for older businesses. However, by taking the time now to identify potential problem areas in your processes, you’re setting the groundwork for future improvement projects to be a success.

Identifying Waste

One of the most vital things you can do after mapping out your processes is to start the streamlining process. For this, we’d recommend the identification and elimination of wastes in your processes. Unnecessary movement of products, excess inventory, excess motion from workers, and overproduction are just a few of these primary concerns. If you’re familiar with Lean, this is more aptly summarized with TIMWOODS, which stands for:

• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Waiting
• Overproduction
• Overprocessing
• Defects
• Skills

Based on the findings in your process mapping and the identification of wastes, you can take the time to streamline your processes. To minimize the risk of these processes moving out of spec again, you’ll want to create standard operating procedures. These provide a baseline to guarantee consistency and minimize the chance of human errors occurring.

Empowering Employees

Employees are your frontline when it comes to customer complaints, and are likely among the first in your staff to be made aware of any potential problems. As such, it becomes crucial that you take the necessary steps to empower them with the means to solve and communicate issues as they arise.

Training

Training should be the cornerstone of any modern business. Familiarization with your company’s products, customer service skills, and conflict resolution is all vital for maintaining customer trust and employee empowerment. You don’t want your frontline workers to be left waiting for your managers to handle the problem. They can and should be equipped to handle issues before the need to escalate arises.

Feedback Loops and Improvements

Your employees are people with thoughts, concerns, and so forth. Enabling them to communicate openly and transparently isn’t just good for morale, it’s good for business. These are the people who are often in the thick of it, working with established processes and hearing from customers. They will likely have invaluable insights to help you ascertain where things are going wrong in the future.

Quality Management

As you start implementing fixes, streamlining processes, and empowering employees, there’s one more area to focus on to minimize customer complaints. Proactive quality management means you’re catching these issues and preventing them before they make it into the final product. Depending on your preferred approach, we’ve got two preferred methods.

FMEA

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, or FMEA, is a proactive means of analyzing processes or products to identify potential pain points. These pain points are then ranked based on severity, occurrence, and detectability. When looking at the more severe items, you’ll want to implement actions that mitigate high-risk failures.

SPC

Statistical process control is a fantastic means of monitoring process variables, like product dimensions, in real time. This is done through established upper and lower control limits, and can quickly identify problem areas as they arise. If production is going out of control, you have insight as to why that might have happened, and can readily address problems before they ship out to your customers.

Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Above all else, the most important thing you can do to minimize customer complaints and increase satisfaction is to build a culture of continuous improvement. Regular Kaizen events are heavily recommended, and can benefit cross-functional teams as they workshop fixes in just a few short days to remediate issues.

Additionally, any continuous improvement failures are going to be an abject failure without leadership commitment. Getting your managers to buy in is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to building a lasting culture of continuous improvement.

Finally, improvement is never done, and implementing an ongoing cycle of PDCA, or Plan, Do, Check, and Act, should become second nature for your organization.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to keep going? You might want to take a closer look at how Six Sigma can give your organization a competitive edge when it comes to manufacturing. Many of the concepts we’ve touched upon in today’s discussion directly relate to methodologies like Six Sigma. This data-driven approach to decision-making has been one of the dominant methodologies in the business world for decades, and it isn’t a surprise as to why.

If you’d like to go a step further beyond what we’ve discussed today, you might want to look at Kaizen techniques you can use to course-correct production quality in real time. Modern businesses can’t rest on their laurels. Taking a proactive approach now is a way to make sure customer satisfaction stays high.

Conclusion

Customer complaints are a reason to show concern, but it doesn’t mean you have to panic. Taking the right proactive steps is the key to building a lasting relationship with your customers. But, to do so, you’ll need a culture of continuous improvement to guide the way.