Version Control

Reference Documents

Functional Process 6 - Complaint Management

1. Process Overview

The Complaint Management process is divided into multiple process steps and Phases, each one related to different Status. This allows not only capturing, log and tracking complaints, but also to be able to assign and notify and to to right Actors that should be involved on each step of the Complaint Management Process. Additionally, investigations and corrective actions are also logged in the system. Furthermore, this process enables to communicate with the customer on progress and resolution of the complaint.

2. Complaint Assignments 

Assigning a Complaint to a User or a Group of User is to pass the responsibility to act on the Complaint on a particular phase of the process. On Salesforce, the Complaint Assignment is based on the field Case Owner.

A Case Owner can be a User (Solvay employee with a Salesforce license) or a Queue (a group of Users that should be part of a team to handle Complaints with the same criteria).

Based on each GBU own process and rules, the Complaint Assignment can be performed by:

• • Manually changing the Owner – at any time, a User with Access to a Complaint can click the button Change next to the current owner and select a new User/Queue to be the new Owner
  • Manually choosing the actors – on the creation (from the fields Originator, Investigator* and Commercial Assignee*) or at any time (from the Case Team section) Users are able to select the future actors. The Owner will be changed then automatically based the change of the Status
  • Automatically selecting the actors – the GBU has provided the rules, based on Complaint criteria, to allow the System to automatically change the Ownership of a Complaint to a specific User or a Queue when the Status changes

3. Complaint Notifications

On each step of the Complaint Management Process, a set of Solvay personalities (Salesforce or not Salesforce Users) needs to be notify that a new Complaint has now moved to a specific Status in order to act (Complaint Owners) or to be informed.

On each Status change, an email is sent from Salesforce to a group of users, based on System Rules and GBU Rules that should be stored and displayed in the Activity History Section of a Complaint. There are four types of Addressees on the Complaint Notification Email when the Status is changed:

• • The new Owner – if your GBU has implemented assignment rules and the owner is changed automatically to a specific User or to a Queue, the new Owners will receive the Notification Email.
  • The previous Owner (if not a Queue) – normally the previous owner is the User that changed the Status and triggered the notification. He/she will be also notified  to ensure that the correct Owner has been assigned
  • The Case Team – all Case Team Members, independent of their Role will receive the Notification Email
  • Solvay Contacts on Notification Rules – group of contacts (not necessary Salesforce Users) that are selected to be notified when the Status is changed based on each GBU Rules.

4. Complaint Management Process

The Complaint Management process is divided into 5 different Phases and 8 different Status.  

The 8 different Statuses are defined as described in the following table. The Statuses from New to Completed are associated with the ‘Open Complaint’ Record Type, that allow Users to access the Complaint Layout in a Read/Write mode (if the User have permissions to edit the Complaint). For Complaints with Status Closed, the Record Type linked is the ‘Close ReadOnly Complaint’ that will only allow Users to access the layout in Read mode.

Complaint Registration

When creating a new Complaint, the user needs to input transactional reference numbers in order to pull a set of data from SAP ECC

These fields are :

• • • Document Source: choice between the 2 SAP systems
      • WP1
      • PF1
    • Document Type
• • • • Sales Order Number
      • Shipment Number
      • Outbound Delivery Number
    • Document Reference
    • Item Number

In the case that the Sales Order is linked to a single Delivery, the Delivery number is pulled from SAP along with the data of the Delivery. 

The user can enter the Shipment number as document reference to pull Delivery information in case of a relationship 1:1 between Shipment number and Delivery number.

For Internal Complaint, the user will need to use the Outbound Delivery Number as Document Reference. The Purchase Order Number cannot be used as a Document Reference.

In the case that the user does not have any reference number, a “Skip” button allows him to create the complaint without pulling any data from SAP. Nevertheless, the user will still be able to update the document reference fields at a later stage and the data will be pulled from SAP if he does so.

All fields populated by SAP are read-only and not editable in Salesforce by the users with the exception of the Disputed Quantity, Ship to and GBU. If no SAP transaction is maintained on the Complaint, the fields should stay editable.

 Once the transactional data is pulled from SAP or that the user skipped this step, he has the ability to read and/or record the following information:

Case Information 

[1] This field may be auto-populated, if this information is available from SAP

Complaint Timeline Stream

Complaint Description

In this section the initial description of the Complaint is captured

Order Information

Under this section, there is all the information in regards to the orders.
If applicable and in reference to the Sales Order Number and its Item, to the Outbound Delivery Number and its Item, or to the Shipment Number, some fields will auto-populate with data pulled out of SAP ECC. This fields are read-only if data is pulled from SAP.

[1] This field may be auto-populated, if this information is available from SAP

Containment/Immediate Actions

This section captures the immediate actions that can/should be taken to deal with the Complaint. 

Communicate Complaint Acknowledgement to Customer 

Once the complaint is logged in the system, it is time to communicate a complaint acknowledgement to the customer.  The objective of the communication is to acknowledge to the customer that the complaint has been logged correctly and that it is taken into consideration.

The user can send the email by clicking on the “Send Acknowledgement Mail” button. In addition to the main Contact (by default), the user can also input any valid email address as CC. The Account manager and the CSR, in the Case Team, are automatically put in CC. Additional users may be included in CC if the GBU provided complementary email rules.

Additionally, the user can select any attachments from the Complaint to be sent as attachments with the email.

Under Investigation

Once the Complaint is logged and that we have sent the acknowledgement email to the customer, the investigation process can start. In this stage, the complaint can be flagged as justified or non-justified. A justified Complaint means that the Complaint has been accepted as valid. By default the justified field is on “yes”.

the Investigator can be automatically assigned and notified by the System, based on each GBU Rules.

Investigation

Basic information that can be needed for the investigation process can be found on this section.

Root Cause

This section groups all the fields related to the Root Cause Analysis.

Corrective Action Plan Development and Implementation

This section groups all the fields related to the Corrective Action Plan and its implementation. 

Recurrence Prevention & Effectiveness Verification

This Section is where we can maintain the effectiveness of the Corrective Actions as well as how they can prevent Complaint recurrence, if applicable. 

Under Review

Once the Investigation has been completed, or when a response needs to be sent to the Client even if the Investigation is still pending (see 6.2.4.1), the Investigator should manually change the Status to ‘Under Review’ to trigger the Review Phase normally by the Commercial Assignee. The Commercial Assignee can be automatically assigned and notified by the System, based on each GBU Rules.

The main activity of this phase it to build a proposal for the Response that should be sent to the Customer by filling the field Commercial Response and Customer Communication.

Proposal Customer Response

Customer Communication

Once the Commercial Assignee has built the Commercial Response Proposal, the communication is now ready to be sent to the Customer. The Commercial Assignee can be automatically assigned and notified by the System, based on each GBU Rules. 

In order to send the final communication to the customer, there is a button “Send Customer Response” that will open the template of the final communication email which can be previewed and is editable.

The email of the main Contact assigned to the Complaint will automatically be populated as the recipient, and the Account manager and the CSR in the Case Team are automatically put in CC.

The 3 communication templates (acknowledgement email, final communication email and the 8D Report) are available in the following 16 languages (including simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese) :

• • • English
    • German
    • French
    • Spanish
    • Portuguese
    • Chinese (simplified)
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Italian
    • Dutch
    • Bulgarian
    • Finnish
    • Polish
    • Russian
    • Thaï
    • Chinese (traditional)

The language of the main Contact is used to determine the language in which the acknowledgement email, final communication email and the 8D Report templates will be generated. In case no language is assigned to the main Contact, the default language of the communication is set to English.

Even though the language of the communication is the one of the main Contact, the user has the possibility to select another language from a drop-down list 

The “Acknowledgement Sent” and “Final Communication Sent” checkbox will only be checked if one of the recipients of the Acknowledgement Email or the Final Communication to the Customer is the main Contact on the Complaint

Once the Communication Email is sent from Salesforce, the Complaint Status is automatically changed to Completed or to Waiting for Final Investigation (see statuses ) 

When the Complaint is Completed, the sections Case Motive Information (except for Motive and Sub-motive), Complaint Description, Customer Information, and Order Information are blocked and cannot be edited.