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This information can be used to develop food safety and quality programs that meet the requirements of modern Regulatory, Customer and Industry Standards:
When considering the development, documentation, and implementation of Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management within food safety and quality management systems, the following information should be considered to ensure effective outcomes:
Without customers, food businesses do not survive! Food businesses must understand the rapidly changing and evolving requirements of customers, and anticipate customer requirements before they change. This process is aimed at meeting customer requirements through a strategic approach to identifying and managing customer needs.
The benefits of customer focus include:
The Senior Management of any food business must play a leading role within the management and review of the Customer Focus and Customer Complaints processes. This will ensure general awareness of product or service issues as they occur, rather than after a significant incident has occurred.
Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management review activities must be scheduled, conducted, and recorded as elements of established Verification Activities within any food business.
Customer focus activities are important to verify the related processes. These activities can be divided into two areas; Proactive Customer Focus and Reactive Customer Focus:
Proactive Customer focus generally involves a communicative process to ensure systems and procedures are developed, implemented, and maintained to provide a strong foundation on which customer requirements can be met, and customer expectations can be exceeded. Proactive Customer Focus provides a strong foundation upon which mutually beneficial customer relationships can be built and maintained.
Proactive Customer Focus may include:
Reactive Customer Focus includes procedures and mechanisms through which customer incidents, concerns, or complaints are received, investigated, and rectified within appropriate timeframes, and with the required sufficiency. Corrective and preventative actions are important elements of this process, as they can be used to ensure similar incidents, concerns or complaints do not occur again.
Customer Focus is better managed and maintained by proactive measures, but reactive measures must be readily available for the management of any customer issues if and when they arise.
Reactive Customer Focus may include:
Customer requirements are the aspects that the customer or consumer wants from a product or service from any particular business. Once the basic and expected elements of customer requirements have been met, desired and unanticipated elements can be addressed to produce increased customer confidence and loyalty.
A common method of understanding what elements of your Customer Focus and Customer Complaints Management systems require the most attention is to find out from your customer what exactly is important to them. This may be done by presenting a survey to your customer, including questions such as the following:
Once you have received feedback from your customers, you can define which customer requirements can be categorized as important, which are presented in the logical sequential order from the elements that need to be addressed first:
Basic elements are those that are critical to providing value to the customer. These could be either the product itself or how a service provider acts towards the customer. Both examples need to ensure that a proactive approach to customer focus is implemented, as there is no point trying to sell the product or service to the customer without these basic elements
Expected elements of the product or service are what the customer has come to expect from the supplier. These are usually pre-conceived expectations, based on best practices, legislative and industry compliance. Expected elements include the customer’s expectation that the sales and marketing team of the food business has high levels of product and process knowledge. Customers also expect that food is of substantial quality and safe until its designated use by date.
Desired elements of customer expectations are those that the customer does not expect, but value highly and genuinely appreciates when they are present. These may include promotional or permanent size increases for a product or complementary addition to a service provided. Desired elements are an important resource in maintaining customer confidence and loyalty to brands of products and services. Desired elements add value for the customer, and also promote added value for the supplier through return custom.
Unanticipated elements are often grouped closely with the desired elements but are generally separated when the expectations of the customer have been overwhelmed. This may include circumstances in which the customer is given products and/or services that are far beyond what they had anticipated. It may be an unexpected offer from the supplier to assist with transport costs, or the initial offer from the supplier to tailor a product and/or service to the customer’s specific requirements.
It is important to consider that desired and unanticipated elements can become expected elements within long-term supplier and customer relationships. This is not always a negative situation, as long-term customer interactions are beneficial to both suppliers and customers alike.
When your business receives a customer complaint, it is important to record the complaint details and conduct an investigation before responding to the complaint. This enables your business to identify potentially unsafe products and correct non-conformance issues or opportunities for improvement within your food safety management systems.
There are three main components to the Customer Complaint Management process:
Complaints should be recorded by a designated individual or individuals and should include details such as:
Retail details including:
Illness and Injury details including:
Customer complaints may be received by-proxy through a member of staff, from a completed customer feedback form, or through general mail directed to management. Complaints transposed directly to a member of staff should be actioned immediately; taking into account the content and authentic nature of any comments received. It is crucial to remember that the reputation of yourself and your business may be at stake after a complaint, so it is in the best interests of all involved to rectify the problem with propriety. Complainants should be encouraged to substantiate a serious complaint in a written form. Such objective evidence would form the basis of any investigation required to address the issue of concern. Complaint subjects may be specified regarding the associated responsibilities of management staff.
Key team members with responsibility for the Customer Complaints process should liaise closely with other key team members regarding any complaints, addressing corrective actions, and providing appropriate and timely responses to the complainant. Details should be documented, archived, and regularly reviewed as part of standard procedures.
Should a food-borne illness outbreak occur in relation to a particular food business, the impact on the business and the alleged ill or injured can be substantial. The following section suggests a scenario and procedures to follow if a suspected foodborne illness outbreak is alleged against your business:
A customer contacts your food business to inform you that they or someone that they know have become ill as a result of consuming your product.
You can follow the following steps which are displayed in logical sequence in handling the matter appropriately. It is essential to remain objective regarding the submission throughout the investigation until a conclusion is reached.
1. Regard the matter as very serious: At this point, no one has been proven guilty, and due process requires a diplomatic approach. Your business may wish to propose to the complainant or those allegedly affected some form of compensation, though this action should not be pursued until the findings of the investigation are absolute and legal advice has been sought;
2. Remain calm and courteous with the complainant at all times and do not try to offer explanation until an investigation has been undertaken;
3. Record the following details from the complainant as appropriate, keeping in mind that all interactions with the complainant must remain confidential:
The information needs to be promptly evaluated and a decision made on the likelihood that a product-related outbreak has occurred. There are no clear-cut guidelines. The best practice is to consider that a foodborne disease outbreak may have occurred when two or more persons experience a similar foodborne illness after consuming a common foodstuff.
The complaint should be investigated immediately by a suitably qualified person from your business, or by an approved external specialist. The investigation should answer the following questions:
All products that may have been implicated by the problem should be immediately risk assessed and investigated.
Record in your customer complaint file:
Where Customer Complaints involve allegations such as foreign objects, samples of such objects may be provided by the complainant. During the investigative process, it is in the best interests of the food business involved to:
After giving the matter proper consideration, if key team members have reason to believe that a foodborne illness incident has occurred, the following contacts should be facilitated within an appropriate timeframe:
Once the investigation has gathered as much information as possible from all relevant sources:
A local health authority notification contact list should contain the following information:
Outcomes of his notification process generally include details for:
The following details should be recorded as an element of notifications:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Development requirements in relation to their items.
Document: A document provides guidance and/or direction for performing work, making decisions, or rendering judgments that affect the safety or quality of the products or services that customers receive.
Documented policies, procedures, work instructions, and schedules form the basis of any food safety and quality management system. The following documentation formats may be considered to ensure ongoing compliance with specified requirements for Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Documentation requirements in relation to their items.
You may wish to visit the Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Templates section of hassup.com for examples of Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management documentation, record and resource formats commonly applied within food safety and quality systems.
Implementation: Implementation is the application of documented food safety and quality system elements into the actual business operation.
The implementation of Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management within any food business requires genuine commitment from senior management, staff, and visitors to ensure the nominated goals of implementation are achievable on an ongoing basis. It is a step that requires significant planning and consideration of general and specific food business circumstances to ensure the outcomes of Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management do not negatively impact the safety and quality of the food items dispatched from the business.
Implementation of Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management must include a clear definition of responsibilities and authorities for all levels of participation by senior management, staff, and visitors to the site.
When implementing Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management within food safety and quality system, you may wish to consider the following requirements before completion:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Implementation requirements in relation to their items.
Monitoring: Monitoring is the act of reviewing and confirming measurable parameters of a defined process or product status.
Monitoring requirements within food industry sectors are generally identified against limits of acceptability defined within HACCP plans, implementation procedures, and work instructions. Monitoring usually includes some element of record-keeping, which may be maintained manually or through digital systems. It is important to consider that advancements in technology have spawned many systems and processes which are self-monitored and or self-adjusted when variances are identified. Regardless of the system used; The goal of any monitoring activity is to provide sufficient evidence that any limit of acceptability has been met.
Traditional Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management monitoring requirements include manual recording and the application of corrective actions when the results of monitoring are found to be outside acceptable limits. Corrective Actions should also generally be strongly linked to the monitoring process where applied to ensure full traceability of the applied actions.
Common monitoring activities and record formats may apply to Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management:
The data and information collected through Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management activities can provide a wealth of information for any business. In the best-case scenario, positive customer feedback can be used as a form of validation that the business’ systems are well-formatted and managed. Though important, positive feedback should never be used as a substitution for continuous improvement. Negative customer feedback can be used as a mechanism to identify and correct system failures, which are related to customer feedback. This is not ideal, as it requires negative feedback to be initiated, but it should be considered whenever negative customer feedback is received.
Customer focus data and information can be sourced from:
Most food businesses maintain trending and data analysis tools to ensure the outcomes of Customer Complaints can be used as a stimulus for continuous improvement within their business operation. It is important to acknowledge and use the data and information received to demonstrate the commitment of the business to meeting the customer’s requirements and exceeding the customers’ expectations. This is commonly done by trending data and information to identify areas of interest.
A simple application of such trending is to identify classes of customer complaints over a designated period; monthly is commonly used. This may include defining how many customer complaints have been received in the past month regarding:
The number of each relative complaint item could then be graphed, and compared to previous months. Targets or Key Performance Indicators are often used to set performance levels, which can also validate continuous improvement activities. Key Performance Indicators are often set for a specific period:
For example, Customer complaints regarding product color may have averaged 10 per month for the past year. A Key Performance Indicator might be set for an average of less than 5 per month for the coming 12-month period. If this Key Performance Indicator is met, the business has succeeded, and this is a good indication that the quality systems and procedures are working well. If the Key performance Indicator is exceeded, the quality system and procedures may need some attention regarding the corrective and preventative action processes.
When collating Customer Complaint data and information, it is important to consider that Customer ‘Comments’ are not ‘Complaints’. The data inputted for Customer Complaints trending and analysis should display customer comments separately to complaints. This will ensure complaints figures are accurate, whilst still including information regarding customer comments, which can still be a valuable continuous improvement tool for any food business.
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Monitoring requirements in relation to their items.
You may wish to visit the Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Templates section of haccp.com for examples of Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management documentation, record and resource formats commonly applied within food safety and quality systems.
Corrective Action: Corrective action is mandatory action to be taken when a deviation to the Quality System occurs, particularly in relation to a Critical Control Point.
Preventative Action: At any step in the process where a hazard has been identified, preventive action must be put into place to prevent re-occurrence.
Corrective Action and Preventative Action is implemented to ensure that any identified non-conformance issues are documented, investigated, and rectified within appropriate time-frames. Corrective action is any action applied to regain control over a product, process, policy, or procedure that has been identified as being non-conforming or outside nominated limits of acceptability. Preventative action is any action applied to prevent any identified non-conformance from reoccurring.
The outcomes of corrective and preventative actions should result in regained process control after effective application. Specified corrective actions are commonly linked to the HACCP Plans and the food business certification process.
Below are Corrective Action and Preventative Action examples which may be associated with Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management related non-conformance:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Corrective Action requirements in relation to their items.
You may wish to visit the Corrective Action and Preventative Action section of haccp.com for examples of best practice applications for this food safety and quality system element.
Verification: The act of reviewing, inspecting, testing, checking, auditing, or otherwise establishing and documenting whether items, processes, services, or documents conform to specified requirements.
Verification is the detailed review of all food safety and quality system elements to confirm that they are effectively developed, documented, implemented, monitored, and reviewed. All food safety and quality system elements, including documented policies, procedures, training, HACCP plans, and their operational applications must be verified on an ongoing scheduled basis. The verification process commonly includes a defined schedule for which verification activities are required, how often they are conducted, who is responsible, and detailed documented procedures for each nominated verification activity.
The general goal of an established verification process is to ensure any systemic non-conformance issues are identified and rectified within an appropriate time frame. When non-conformance issues are identified through the verification process, Corrective Actions and Preventative Actions should be implemented to ensure they do not impact the effectiveness of the food safety and quality system.
The following examples of verification activities may be applicable to Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Verification requirements in relation to their items.
You may wish to visit the Verification Activities section of haccp.com for examples of best practice applications for this food safety and quality system element.
Validation: The process of gathering evidence to provide a scientific basis for the documented act of demonstrating that a procedure, process, and activity will consistently lead to the expected results. It often includes the qualification of systems and equipment.
Validation is the provision of evidence to support the limits of control or acceptability for food safety or quality parameters nominated within systemic elements. Limits of control or acceptability are commonly included within documented food safety and quality systems elements such as procedures, HACCP plans, and specifications.
Common sources of validation include regulatory and legislative standards, finished product specifications and customer requirements, industry codes of practice and guidelines, verified and validated research, historical product, and process control outcomes, and analytical testing.
The general goal of an established validation process is to ensure any systemic non-conformance issues are identified and rectified within an appropriate time frame. When non-conformance issues are identified through the verification process, Corrective Actions and Preventative Actions should be implemented to ensure they do not impact the effectiveness of the food safety and quality system.
Validation activities are commonly defined within the verification schedules and procedures of established food safety and quality management systems.
The following examples may be applicable to the validation of the limits of control or acceptability for Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Validation requirements in relation to their items.
You may wish to visit the Validation Activities section of haccp.com for examples of best practice applications for this food safety and quality system element.
Skills and Knowledge: Skills and knowledge are attributes of human interactions commonly linked to competency within any specific job-related task.
Training and competency requirements for Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management must be ongoing, including regular scheduled reviews to ensure the effectiveness of training and competency outcomes.
Team members who have defined responsibilities regarding Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management should have knowledge including:
Team members who have defined responsibilities regarding Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management should have skills including:
Team members who have defined responsibilities regarding Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management should have access to resources including:
If your food business supplies foodstuffs manufactured to a customer’s specifications, it is important to consider any specific Customer Focus and Customer Complaint Management Training, Competency, and Resources requirements in relation to their items.
You may wish to visit the Training, Competency, and Resources section of haccp.com for examples of best practice applications for this food safety and quality system element.
haccp.com was created to support food businesses and food industry professionals in achieving and maintaining the stringent requirements of food industry compliance.