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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.

Product quality is seen as one of the critical differentiating factors in today's globalized markets [1]. Especially industries in high wage countries attempt to balance the disadvantage of higher costs by achieving better quality. Several quality oriented programs, like Six Sigma, Total Quality Management and Kaizen, have been set up by firms in order to gain competitive advantage in terms of process and product quality. All of these programs focus on the alignment of organizations to customer needs in order to produce products of higher quality. Besides these strategic initiatives, what has been widely neglected, is the potential benefit of customer complaints for quality improvement. They are a way of receiving feedback from customers and therefore necessary means for putting into action improvement plans. In addition to that, they are a useful way of measuring performance and allocating resources to deal with the deficient areas of the business [2]. Technical complaint management comprehends all technical related efforts in order to solve the criticized nonconformity underlying a complaint. Accordingly, technical complaint management aims on fast identification of failures, immediate clarification of root causes and long-term prevention of reoccurrence [3]. The causal relationship of complaint management activities and companies’ overall financial success factors has been analyzed in empirical studies and found to be statistically significant [4] and [5]. As opposed to this, the positive impact of complaint management on product and process quality improvements has not been evaluated empirically in literature. Potential reasons for this blind spot are the lack of quality oriented research in the field and the absence of a process model describing the internal work content of technical complaint management. Accordingly, the paper is structured as follows: In the first part a reference model for technical complaint management is described, which helps companies to structure their internal processes for complaint handling. It serves as a measurement construct for an empirical study whose design is described in the second part of the paper. In the last part, preliminary results of the study are discussed.

The paper pointed out the need for a quality oriented view on technical complaint management. Current research is focused on the reestablishment of customer's satisfaction and lacks concrete structures for the internal handling of complaints. The systematic of entrepreneurial quality control loops and their applicability as a framework for technical complaint management was shown. Based on this, a reference model was developed and briefly described to help companies structure their internal processes in order to trigger improvements from customer complaints. The reference model is the foundation of an empirical study among the machine tool building industry in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, whose preliminary results were presented. The aims of this study were the validation of the developed model and the quantified evaluation of technical complaint management's impact on defined quality factors. The preliminary results show strong positive correlations with the effectiveness and efficiency model. Based on these results the validity of the model and its impact on quality can be assumed to be positive and significant. Nevertheless the survey should be transferred to further industries and regions in order to achieve more significant results and to corroborate the formulated hypotheses on a broader basis and independent of branches. As the effectiveness of the developed reference model for technical complaint management was shown, the machine tool building industry can benefit from its implementation and increase product quality significantly. From a scientific perspective, the results pave the way to quantitative modeling of complaint management and thus a deeper understanding of determinants and success factors. For detailed information on the conduction of the survey, the questionnaire and scales included, please contact: a.linder@wzl.rwth-aachen.de