Creating a Customer Complaint

A customer complains about a product. A sales representative or the quality technician documents the customer complaint in the SAP system. They use quality notifications in SAP S/4HANA Quality Management to process the complaint.

The following figure displays a high-level process flow of how a customer complaint is managed.

1. Entry of complaint

   When a customer complaint is received - for example, through an e-mail or a phone call, the notification creator - for example, a call center agent, captures all the relevant details, including the description of the issue, customer, purchasing, and delivery information, pictures, and so on. This ensures that all the necessary information is available for further analysis and investigation by the quality department. If required, you can already now document that immediate actions were executed.

2. Routing to responsible department

   The complaint is then distributed to the appropriate department or personnel responsible for analyzing and resolving the issue. This distribution is based on predefined rules, ensuring that the complaint reaches the individuals with the relevant expertise. For example, you can define users that are responsible for processing of complaints with respect to a certain material. If no predefined rules exist, you can also manually distribute the complaint. The user responsible for this defines immediate and corrective actions and assigns them to action processors.

3. Actions

   The assigned personnel receive notifications and investigate the complaint. They analyze the problem and determine the root cause of the problem. If the defective item must be returned prior to analysis, you can also use quality notifications to manage the return process. Based on the investigation, the responsible personnel develop an appropriate resolution strategy. This may involve taking corrective actions such as issuing refunds, replacing products, scheduling repairs, or implementing process improvements to prevent similar complaints in the future. The system allows for the recording and tracking of these actions, and involved parties can be automatically informed through e-mail.

4. Close Notification

   When all of these actions are completed, the notification processor is informed and closes the issue. If your customer requires an investigation report, for example, following the 8D methodology, you can create reports using the data from the quality notification.

In this demonstration, the following steps will be executed:

1. Create a quality notification for a delivery to a customer
2. Document an immediate action
3. Create a return delivery
4. Set the notification in process for further processing