By focusing on immediate response, team delegation, and identifying root causes, we can quickly reduce the backlog of complaints and set up an action plan that will address customer dissatisfaction and avoid long-term damage to the company’s reputation.

Initial Thoughts & Assumptions

To handle the surge in customer complaints and service tickets effectively in the first 24 hours, these are my overarching assumptions that help guide my decision-making outlined in this case study.

Urgency/Severity

Quality issues like melted product are immediate problems that directly affect customer satisfaction and the company’s reputation. They should be prioritized over issues that deal with operations or shipping delays.

In addition, my assumption based on this scenario is that the customer complaint rate (# of complaints / # of transactions) went over 5%, creating an abnormally large rate of quality complaints.

It is also my assumption that the issue is isolated to something that can be triaged quickly, rather than a systemic issue. Additional considerations would need to occur if this was large-scale systemic breakdown that requires reform and even relaunch/rebranding and broader customer communication.

Volume/Scale

I am addressing the category of issue with the highest percentage of occurrence in relation to its standard YTD percentage to help prioritize the team’s efforts further.

In this case, quality issues not only leads in volume of tickets, but is also 15% higher than its standard YTD percentage making it an obvious surge and critical to address in a standardized and coordinated way.

Shipping delays are averaging the same between launch and YTD percentage, making it an issue, but not something that they company hasn’t continuously dealt with.

Customer Type

While current subscription and repeat buyers should likely be considered our most valuable customers for their lifetime value, it’s possible that these first time buyers could, if they have a positive experience, become repeat buyers and therefore are valuable because we have already spent funds to acquire them.

My assumption is that we have more flexibility with our response to subscription and repeat buyers if the brand has a quality issue because we already have a relationship with them and have had time to build trust. Conversely, if the first time buyer has a negative experience, they may do more to disparage the brand and share their experience online if the brand doesn’t act quickly.

Align the Team

  1. Service Team
    1. Immediately after analyzing this info, hold a team meeting to address the surge.
    2. Align and delegate these tasks
    3. Ask for any roadblocks in availability for the next few days ie Are we going to be short on anyone due to PTO, etc? Can we ensure all these tasks can still get done?
  2. Fulfillment/QA Team
    1. Reach out to the Head of Fulfillment/Production (along with leadership depending on delegation) to share the surge intel surrounding the product quality issue.
      1. Clearly communicate the immediate need to identify the root cause of the issue:
        1. Is it a product issue? Have fulfillment team fulfill the SOP for production and packing QA to understand why pints are arriving melted. Is the formula affecting how the ice cream is freezing?
        2. Is there a breakdown in the cold chain process?
          1. Reach out to Operations Lead to work with distributors to find a temporary and/or long-term remedy (works with Service Team Member B)
          2. Contact the logistics team or 3PL if this issue could possibly be due to shipping delays (there may be multiple issues happening at once)
  3. Brand team
    1. Brand/Marketing Director
      1. Brief marketing team on issue and partner (as needed) to draft Communication Plan
      2. Discuss any other PR risks related to the issue and create a separate action plan (this would be more relevant for a systemic problem) (works with Director of Service)
    2. Social Media Manager
      1. If channel doesn’t already exist, create a ticketing system connected to complaints that come through all active social channels to track the amount of complaints through there. (works with Service Team member A+C)
      2. Align on responses, especially for the product quality issues (See Communication Plan)
  4. Finance and/or Leadership team
    1. Confirm compensation plan for affected customers.
      1. How will this affect our P&L? Do we need to adjust the offer to ensure profits stay in a comfortable range?
  5. Sales
    1. Assuming that Sundae Funday only handles direct delivery, we wouldn’t need to coordinate with sales and relevant retailers to further triage the situation, however, they would be included in team-wide communication.

<aside> 💬

Once each of these teams have been communicated with, I would:

  1. Send a document outlining the entire team’s next steps so everyone is aware of how we’re handling the issue.

  2. Arrange a Team Huddle to create collective synergy towards handling this issue as a team.

</aside>

In order to begin this next step, we’d need to get confirmation from the Fulfillment team on the root cause of the issue. In my outline, I am assuming that this would not be a systemic issue. If it was, however, we would need to work more closely with leadership and the brand/PR team to understand how we can communicate the issue at broad level instead of individually to each customer.

Triage Customer Complaints