Turning Complaints into Improvement: Highlights from the Customer Service Excellence Collaborative Forum
Complaints may not be the favourite part of anyone’s job, but they often hold the most valuable learning. At our recent Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Collaborative Forum, organisations from across the UK came together to explore how complaints can drive practical improvement, stronger culture, and better customer experience.
This session centred on three key questions:
- How do we measure complaints effectively?
- How do we build a culture that learns from them?
- How do leadership and communication shape that culture?
Even with different sectors and structures represented, clear themes emerged.
Where organisations are today
Some organisations have established systems with detailed complaint coding, dashboards, and regular reporting. Others are at an earlier stage, with low complaint volumes and fewer opportunities for trend analysis. What they all share is the desire to move beyond simply responding to complaints and towards learning from them.
What makes a difference
Across the forum, participants highlighted several approaches that strengthen both complaints handling and overall service culture.
Record the full picture
Capturing every complaint — including issues resolved at the frontline — creates a more accurate understanding of customer experience and helps organisations identify patterns they may otherwise miss.
Focus on trends, not just totals
Meaningful insight comes from identifying themes such as timeliness, communication, or process delays, and then reviewing how these vary across teams or services.
Learn from what works
Understanding how issues are successfully resolved is just as important as analysing what went wrong. Positive resolutions help build repeatable practice.
Communicate improvements
Visible “you said, we did” updates — shared internally or externally — help shift perceptions and reinforce that complaints lead to positive change.
Strengthen staff confidence
Training in objection handling, calm conversations, and early intervention helps staff feel more capable and reduces the emotional weight often associated with complaints.
Leadership sets the tone
When senior leaders review complaints data, discuss themes, and support action planning, complaints move from being operational noise to strategic intelligence.
All of these practices align closely with the principles of the Customer Service Excellence Standard, particularly around insight, fairness, accessibility and continuous improvement.
Want the full learning?
The complete session recording, group insights and practical examples are available inside the Assessment Services Community
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