Navigating Complaints, Appeals and Impartiality with Confidence

Join ANAB for a free webinar! Complaints, appeals and impartiality are critical elements of a robust management system, but often present challenging situations for organizations. This webinar explores practical approaches for identifying, managing and resolving complaints and appeals while safeguarding impartiality and maintaining stakeholder confidence.

Many organizations have complaint and appeal procedures, as well as an impartiality statement, but they struggle with implementation.

Organizations often struggle deciding:

  • when an expression of dissatisfaction is a complaint
  • when a customer is requesting corrective action
  • at what point customer disagreement becomes an appeal
  • and, how to demonstrate impartiality rather than simply claiming it

In this webinar, we will define complaints, appeals and impartiality and explore how to investigate complaints and appeals objectively. Managing conflicts of interest and impartiality will also be discussed. Attendees will gain a better understanding of common challenges, potential risks and effective practices that support compliance and continual improvement.

Key Takeaways

  • Understand the difference between a complaint and appeal
  • Learn practices to manage complaints, appeals and impartiality
  • Understand common challenges and potential risks related to complaints, appeals and impartiality
  • Evaluate complaints and appeals as improvement tools

Who Should Attend

Inspection body, laboratory, proficiency testing provider, reference material producer and certification body personnel who interact with complaints and appeals, managers, technicians, customer service representatives, sales executives

Audience Questions

At the end of the webinar, questions were asked by the webinar’s attendees. These included:

  • A former employee manager, now working independently, obtained documents through a request and then emailed the organization accusing them of applying quality assurance procedures incorrectly.  They stated a response was not expected. We documented it as a complaint due to the nature of the email, but was that necessary due to them not expecting a response?
  • Are testing failures considered a decision that can appealed, or is it a complaint if a client disagrees with the failure?
  • In our organization, we have encountered cases where a third party, anyone other than the client who received the decision, claims the organization’s decision was incorrect and request that it be retracted. Would this therefore constitute an appeal by an outside party rather than a complaint.
  • Is it necessary to have different levels of appeals? In other words, if the appellant disagrees with the decision, can they appeal again to a higher level? If so, what regulations allow for this for more than one level of appeal?
  • Can a laboratory require a policy that complaints be submitted from a specific form, for example, a Google form, and anything submitted outside that be viewed as a dissatisfaction versus a formal complaint.
  • How do you address bad press about the lab? When does this go through a formal complaint process rather than a simple direct process?
  • Do you recommend using risk analysis as part of the complaint process?
  • Do they specifically have to say I m unhappy, dissatisfied, etc.? Or can a complaint be demonstrated through the sentence tone? For example, I am following up again as I did not receive a response the other two times I reached out.
  • What is the best way to demonstrate impartiality as an organization via the mechanism of impartiality? Any practices recommended?
  • Does every expression of dissatisfaction or negative opinion require tracking as a complaint?

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