cx-complaint-root-causelisted

# Complaint root cause and remediation Complaint root-cause analysis has a characteristic failure: the analysis is done, the themes are named, actions are assigned, the report is filed — and the complaints keep arriving at the same rate. A year later the same themes are rediscovered by a different analyst. The reason is almost never the analysis. It is that **remediation is not tracked to outcome**, so nobody notices when an action was completed and the cause was not removed. ## Cause, not category A complaint category is a reporting bucket. A cause is a mechanism you could remove. > Category: "payment delays" > Cause: "transfers submitted after 15:00 miss the cut-off, and the product does not > say so until after submission" The second one names something a team can change. The first names something you can count. **Most complaint reporting stops at the first and then wonders why the numbers do not move.** Get to causes bottom-up. Read a sample of the actual complaints in a category rather than trusting its label, and expect to find that one category contains three unrelated causes and that two categories share one. ## Classify the cause by where it sits The classification determines the owner and the remedy, and this is where the analysis earns its keep: - **Product or service defect** — it did not work. - **Process design** — it worked as designed and the design produces a bad outcome. - **Communication** — the outcome was correct and the customer was not told, o