Active complaint management with online forms helps companies secure customer loyalty and improve quality assurance. With LamaPoll, encouraging and recording complaints is easy to do online using complaint and claims forms and complaint questionnaires. This page gives an overview of complaint management, its objectives and examples, presents two form templates and offers tips for your complaint management process.
Contents
What is complaint management and what are its objectives?
Within customer relationship and quality management, complaint management covers all systematic measures that companies and organisations take in connection with customer complaints. These include providing ways to complain, receiving and processing complaints, and evaluating them. Complaint management has two main objectives. The first is to win back dissatisfied customers and so prevent them from leaving, as part of churn management. The second is to analyse why complaints arise and make the necessary improvements to products, services or customer service, strengthening quality assurance.
Claims are one part of this. A claim is an objection in which a customer asserts a legal right because of a defect, for example to a repair or replacement. A complaint is broader and covers any expression of dissatisfaction, such as about waiting times or the way someone was treated.
Complaint management is divided into two processes: direct complaint management, which covers everything involving direct contact with the customer, and indirect complaint management, which focuses internally on analysing why complaints arise. Direct complaint management mainly serves the customer relationship, while indirect complaint management mainly serves quality. Both involve several tasks:
For companies and organisations whose main goals are customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, active complaint management is the right approach: encourage complaints and take them seriously, handle them professionally and promptly, and use what you learn from them to drive improvements.
Guidance: ISO 10002 and legal requirements
The international standard ISO 10002 provides a recognised framework. It is a set of guidelines describing how organisations should plan, handle and analyse complaints and continually improve the process. It is not mandatory. In some sectors, however, complaint management is a legal requirement: in Germany, for example, hospitals are obliged to run patient-oriented complaint management.
Not to be confused with whistleblowing: reports of legal violations within a company do not belong in complaint management but in a digital whistleblowing system.
Complaint management examples: forms, questionnaires and more
There are several ways to encourage complaints: online forms such as a complaint form, claims form or complaint questionnaire can be offered directly on your website, so customers can give feedback quickly without leaving the site. Electronic complaint channels also include the comment functions on the social media platforms a company uses. Companies and organisations should monitor their social media channels regularly for critical comments and complaints and respond to negative feedback. Other points of contact are a customer service hotline and easy-to-find email addresses with named contacts for complaints and criticism.
With LamaPoll, you can easily evaluate your customer service with a survey and capture complaints at the same time. You will find a customer support feedback template and more on identifying customer needs here: Identifying customer needs.
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is another metric companies can use to analyse their customer service and the quality of their customer interactions. Find out more about this KPI and get a questionnaire template here: Customer Effort Score (CES).
What should a complaint form include?
A good complaint form is short and only asks for what you actually need to handle the case. These fields have proven useful:
| Field | Purpose | Required/optional |
|---|---|---|
| Type of issue (e.g. product, delivery, service, invoice) | categorises the complaint and triggers the relevant follow-up questions | Required |
| Reference (product, order or customer number, date) | makes the case easy to trace | Optional |
| Description of the problem | describes the issue in the customer’s own words | Required |
| File upload (photo, screenshot, receipt) | documents defects and saves follow-up questions | Optional (Platinum plan and above) |
| Preferred solution (e.g. replacement, refund, call-back) | shows what the customer expects | Optional |
| Contact preference and contact details | needed for follow-up questions and a reply | Required if a reply is requested |
| Privacy notice | explains why the data is collected and how long it is kept | Required whenever personal data is collected |
Only ask for personal data if you need it to handle the complaint. Anyone who prefers to give feedback anonymously should be able to do so.
Complaint management: online form templates
Online forms are a cost-effective and time-efficient way to record complaints. A complaint form offered directly on your website lets customers get in touch quickly and lowers the barrier to complaining. A pre-structured online form is a convenient alternative, particularly for customers who would rather not complain by phone or write a long email. With our survey tool, you can create online complaint and claims forms easily, without any programming knowledge. As a secure survey tool, LamaPoll also meets all the requirements for collecting data in compliance with the GDPR. Data protection and data security play a central role in complaint management with an online form, especially if the form also collects personal data such as contact details for follow-up questions. LamaPoll also lets you embed the form on your own website via iframe. Form creators can activate the monitoring function to receive an email notification as soon as a new complaint comes in.
Claims and complaints form
An online claims and complaints form records claims and complaints in a standardised way and is particularly suitable for frequent, comparable cases. Its predefined structure, targeted questions and answer options make it quick to fill in, so complainants save time compared with complaining by email or letter. A claims and complaints form should be easy to reach and quick to find on your website, ideally within a few clicks. Embedding it via iframe works well here, because the complete form appears on the page rather than just a link to it, which significantly lowers the barrier to raising a complaint. Why give a complaints form such prominence? So that annoyed customers turn directly to the company instead of venting their frustration on social media or among friends, where a damaged reputation is hard to repair.
We provide a free claims and complaints form template that covers four categories of claims and complaints. Depending on their answer, users only see the follow-up questions relevant to the category they chose at the start. Use this example template as a guide and adapt it fully to your needs.
Complaints and ideas management form
Besides pure claims and complaints forms, complaint management can also use online forms that collect both complaints and suggestions for improvement or ideas. This kind of complaints and ideas management via online forms is particularly common among public bodies. Cities and municipalities use ideas management above all to make room for public participation: citizens are encouraged to help shape their community by contributing ideas and suggestions. In LamaPoll, a complaints and ideas management form can be set up so that users first choose the type of message from a predefined list (general enquiry, complaint or idea) and then enter their message in a text field. Complaints and ideas are thus collected in a single online form and can be viewed separately in the analysis using the filter function.
Feel free to use our free “Complaints and ideas management form” template as a guide.
Select “Use” to copy the template to your LamaPoll account and adapt it there. With the file upload function, users can upload files such as images for both complaints and ideas, to illustrate their point or provide evidence. The file upload function is available from the Platinum plan.
What are the benefits of complaint management?
Professional, active complaint management offers companies and organisations many benefits, above all the opportunity to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. A key benefit is building and securing long-term customer relationships: customers who feel heard and taken seriously when they complain are more likely to stay, and satisfied customers often become particularly loyal over time. When this gets around, for example on social media or review platforms, successful complaint management also has a positive effect on the company’s image. Another benefit is that complaints reveal product and process defects that might otherwise go unnoticed. Active complaint management therefore makes it possible to fix these defects, improve internal processes and strengthen quality management.
Benefits of complaint management at a glance
- Identify and fix product and process defects
- Increase customer retention, satisfaction and loyalty
- Improve the image of the company or organisation through satisfied complainants
Key metrics in complaint management
A few key metrics show whether your complaint management is working:
| Metric | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Processing time | how long it takes from receipt to resolution |
| First contact resolution rate | share of complaints fully resolved at the first contact |
| Complaint satisfaction | how satisfied complainants are with the solution and the process |
| Complaint causes | which reasons come up most often, analysed by category |
| Customer Effort Score | how much effort the complaint takes for the customer |
Measuring complaint satisfaction: sample questions
Whether your complaint management works becomes clear once a case is closed. A short survey of complainants closes the loop and gives you measurable results. These questions work well:
- How satisfied are you with the solution to your issue? (scale 1–5)
- How would you rate the time it took to handle your complaint? (scale 1–5)
- How friendly and competent were our staff? (scale 1–5)
- How easy was it for you to get your issue resolved? (scale 1–7, CES question)
- How likely are you to recommend us? (scale 0–10)
- What could we have done better? (free text)
With LamaPoll, you can create a short survey like this in minutes and invite complainants by email.
Eight tips for complaint management
Complaint management offers companies and organisations many long-term benefits. These eight tips will help both your direct and indirect complaint management processes run as smoothly as possible:
Conclusion: turn complaints into opportunities
Active complaint management can turn dissatisfied customers into particularly loyal ones. What matters are easy-to-reach channels, a fast and reliable response and consistent analysis of complaints. Online forms lower the barrier to complaining, deliver structured data and can be followed up with a short satisfaction survey once a case is closed. To learn how to look after your company’s public image beyond this, see reputation management.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is a survey tool for creating online questionnaires. Our survey tool lets you create, run and analyse online questionnaires quickly and easily. Create your questionnaire in just a few steps, customise it for your organisation and conveniently invite customers or employees by email. An online questionnaire enables you to gather insights quickly and easily to improve customer or employee satisfaction. You can register for the LamaPoll survey tool free of charge and immediately create and run online surveys with up to 50 participants. If you need more responses for your online questionnaire, simply choose one of our plans: billed monthly, cancel any month. You can also choose from our online questionnaire templates and examples.
