Technical complaint management from a quality perspective

Abstract

Technical complaint management (TCM) comprises the processes of reception, handling, analysis and use of customer complaints. Its focus lies on the continuous improvement of products and processes based on customer complaints. This paper presents research on this quality-oriented perspective on CM. The approach is structured in four steps. Firstly, the state of the art in CM research is briefly described and analysed for its quality orientation. In order to set a base for the research to be carried out, a target system for quality-oriented CM is presented. The target system combines the customer relationship and quality management perspectives of CM. In accordance with the presented target system a reference model for quality-oriented TCM is developed and presented in detail. The model comprehends the requirements for the internal organisation of TCM in a process model. Its scope reaches from the reception of a complaint to the long-term use of complaint information in new product development. In order to evaluate the relevance of the described reference model for TCM an empirical study was carried out. In the last step, results of the study are discussed and findings are summarised.

Keywords:

• complaint management
• failure management
• reference model
• continuous improvement
• empirical study

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper has been carried out within the research project ‘Gestaltungsmodell für Reklamationsbearbeitungsprozesse’ (SCHM 1856/20-1) of the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL), RWTH Aachen University. The authors acknowledge the support of the funding organisation DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).