Root Cause Analysis (RCA) | Improving Complaint Categorisation

This is the first in a series of blogs in which I will share some of my thoughts about good complaint RCA practices observed in the course of our work across a wide range of firms.

The problem of relying on complaint categorisation when performing RCA

There are many sources of data and management information which firms could analyse in order to understand what is negatively impacting their customers, for example, retention data, cancellation rates and customer feedback. However, the primary source for most firms remains the root cause categorisation which is commonly applied by complaint handlers during or after the complaint resolution process (it should go without saying that using complaints data as a primary data source is limiting in terms of conducting effective RCA).