Technical complaint management as a lever for product and process improvement

Complaint management activities have been traditionally seen from the customer relationship point of view, both by researchers and industrialists. Its potential as a driver for quality improvements has been widely neglected in the marketing dominated research field. From a production point of view, root cause analyses of customers’ problems pose a valuable base for improvement of products and processes. The paper examines the impact of complaint management activities as levers for improvement in a quality control loop context. Results of an empirical study based on a reference model for technical complaint management are discussed to quantify effects on quality parameters.