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The paper pointed out the need for a quality oriented view on technical complaint management. Current research is focused on the reestablishment of customer's satisfaction and lacks concrete structures for the internal handling of complaints. The systematic of entrepreneurial quality control loops and their applicability as a framework for technical complaint management was shown. Based on this, a reference model was developed and briefly described to help companies structure their internal processes in order to trigger improvements from customer complaints. The reference model is the foundation of an empirical study among the machine tool building industry in North Rhine- Westphalia, Germany, whose preliminary results were presented. The aims of this study were the validation of the developed model and the quantified evaluation of technical complaint manage ment's impact on defined quality factors. The preliminary results show strong positive correlations with the effectiveness and efficiency model. Based on these results the validity of the model and its impact on quality can be assumed to be positive and significant. Nevertheless the survey should be transferred to further industries and regions in order to achieve more significant results and to corroborate the formulated hypotheses on a broader basis and independent of branches. As the effectiveness of the developed reference model for technical complaint management was shown, the machine tool building industry can benefit from its implementation and increase product quality significantly. From a scientific perspective, the results pave the way to quantitative modeling of complaint management and thus a deeper understanding of determinants and success factors. For detailed information on the conduction of the survey, the questionnaire and scales included, please contact: a.linder@ wzl.rwth-aachen.de .