If you had to ask any Food Safety Manager, “what part of your job do you dislike the most?” most of you will say “customer complaints”.
Fraught with negative emotion, customer complaints is the feedback loop that tells us that something is wrong – it is a red flag. It requires pausing, listening, understanding empathising, investigating and fixing. Analysing and trending complaints provides us with health status profile of our food safety management system, and like most things, nothing is every perfect; if you have customers, complaints are a reality. Like facing Mondays, you can’t run away and hide from them, you have to take them in your stride. It requires a level-headed positive attitude, empathetic heart and a robust, well documented process to manage customer complaints well.