Respond to customer complaints with ready templates

The customers complaints module is one the most widely used modules in Safefood 360°, but of course our customers receive very few complaints. Naturally! Nonetheless it is indeed a popular module due to its fitness for purpose, simplicity and robust reporting. The product development team have been hard at work developing a rather neat little enhancement to this module.

You can now associate a document from your documents module with each non-conformance in the categories module. With this association in place, the next time you are creating a Customer Complaint against a non-conformance with an associated document, you will find a ‘Get Response’ option in your Actions menu. Clicking it will immediately open the response document on the screen allowing the user to print it off and send to the customer, or consumer, whichever the case may be.

Typically the response letters you send out are tailored according to the type and severity of the complaint issue. Minor complaints may require quite a brief response, while more severe complaints will require a detailed explanation including lab analysis results. This new feature allows you to associate a particular response template against each different type of non-conformance. And it ensures that the right response is sent to the customer for the complaint in question.

But it doesn’t stop there! If the associated document is a DOCX file (i.e. Word 2007 or later) you can insert ‘Mergefields’ which will be replaced with the live complaint data before the document is opened by the user. You can choose from 24 different fields to add to your template including the Date of the complaint, the Customer, the Customers Address, Consumer and Product information, the specific Non-conformance and virtually anything else that is present on the complaint form. This should be a significant time saver and reduce potential errors in manually transcribing complaint data to the response letter. In short, after completing your complaint form, with two clicks of your mouse you can have the completed response document ready to be sent off to your customer.

Note that this feature will be released to all customers shortly. In the meantime you can start preparing your response templates and this user guide article will show you how (includes a sample template to get started). We hope you enjoy this new addition to Safefood 360°.