Classification and Escalation Prediction of Complaints in B2B A Study in the Context of Software Industry

Abstract

newline Customer satisfaction is vital for any organization, contrarily, customer dissatisfaction also is inevitable. There are several occasions when customers observe failure with products or services that they are using or availing. In many of these occasions, customers seek redressal for the failure by contacting organization and organization addresses customer s concern by using customer complaint management system (CCMS). Since product/service failure is inevitable, so in the perspective of customer satisfaction, it s said that it is not the product/service failure, but the failure to recover the failure by organization, that really causes the customer to be dissatisfied. Hence, regardless of the size and type of the organization, complaints are beneficial for organizations because it provides opportunity for recovery. Additionally, it also provides vital information to organizations to identify gaps and rectify errors in products/services. Identification of these errors/gaps helps in improving the product/service. Thus, theoretically complaint information can be widely used to (a) improve product/service (b) retain customer by recovering failure in product/service. Use of CCMS to retain customers, makes it integral part of CRM. Thus, maintaining and operating an effective complaint management system is very important for any organization to improve its product/service and strengthen its customer retention to gain competitive advantage. newlineDespite the wide acceptance of utility of complaints in corporate practice, there are industries where large percentage of complaining customers are not satisfied with organization s complaint management. The level of customer s dissatisfaction with organization s complaint management highlights the need and scope for improvement in CCMS. It s quite natural to assume that to improve CCMS, its underline core-process complaint- handling , which comprises of complaint classification, resolution, solution implementation and escalation as its activities, must be improved.