HOW do you evaluate customer complaints? Known indicators during utilization phase.

[pawel.lang]

Im interested HOW do you evaluate complaints?

Which indicators do you use to compare complaints from one year to another,
or from one production's month to another?

Do you do benchmarking between similar products? If so, how you do that?

Can you perhaps recommmend me some sources for this subject?

[Marc]

I guess my question would be how a company gathers customer complaints and how it defines what a valid customer complaint is.

I've been a consultant for a long time so to me it's company dependent. Maybe if you give a few more details about your situation we could provide some specific info.

I've seen a lot that use paretos but I prefer a simple line graph for numeric aspects - Such as month to month - To easily spot trends.

As to benchmarking against similar products, I haven't seen that used a lot. Most companies I've seen are relatively basic when addressing customer complaints. Ideally (IMO), one would set up categories and log them in a database. That way you could draw out the numbers any way you want such as part number vs. part number, or part number vs. failure within warranty.

Good question. Feedback on how you analyze customer complaints in your company, folks?

[pawel.lang]

In services or by noncomplicated products you may simply gather complaints as sum total per month of production. Then, by relatively constant volume of production you may compare them.

So the simpliest, absolute indicator may be total amount of complaints per month of production. As Marc has suggested.

However in my case product is complex, and production volume vary from one month to another. To evaluate influence of complexity you may add division per art of failure's causes, and then anylse it.
To evaluate the influence of volume of production you may use relative indicators. For instance total amount of complaints per 100 products, caltulated monthly.

Im interested if any of you ever used relative indicators and/or tried to evaluate influence of product complexity on these indicators.