Customer Complaint Handling Template

What is a complaint handling template?

A complaint handling template is a structured format for documenting customer complaints — capturing the issue, investigation steps, resolution, and root cause — so every complaint receives consistent treatment and the organisation learns from recurring problems.

Complaints are a signal, not just a problem. Each one reveals where the product, process, or service failed from the customer’s perspective. Without a structured template, complaints are handled individually and forgotten once resolved. The same issue surfaces again, handled differently by a different agent, with no trend data for the team to act on. A template captures every complaint in the same format — making patterns visible, resolutions consistent, and systemic issues identifiable.

Who should use this template?

This template is for teams that receive and resolve customer complaints:

• Customer Support Managers — ensure every complaint follows the same investigation and resolution process
• Quality Assurance Teams — analyse complaint data to identify recurring issues and drive process improvements
• Compliance Officers — maintain an auditable record of complaint handling for regulatory requirements
• Product Managers — review complaint patterns to inform product improvements and prioritise fixes

What’s included in this template?

The template has two parts: structured metadata fields and the complaint record.

Metadata fields classify each complaint:

• Complaint reference number and date received
• Customer name and contact channel
• Product or service involved
• Severity (critical, high, medium, low)
• Status (received, investigating, resolved, closed)
• Assigned handler

Complaint record documents the case:

• Complaint summary — what the customer reported, in their own terms
• Investigation — steps taken to understand the issue, including evidence gathered
• Root cause — the underlying reason the issue occurred
• Resolution — actions taken to resolve the customer’s specific complaint
• Preventive action — changes to prevent the same issue from recurring

How to create and customise this template in Elium

1. Open the Template Builder — Go to your profile menu and select the Template Builder tab, or click “+ Create” and choose “Create a new template”.
2. Set the scope — Choose an icon, enable the template, and decide whether it applies platform-wide or to specific spaces (e.g. your Customer Service or Quality Management space).
3. Add structured fields — Click “Field” to add metadata: text fields for reference number and customer name, tag fields for channel, product, severity, and status, a date field for date received, and a user field for assigned handler. Mark reference number, severity, and status as mandatory.
4. Build the record structure — Use the “+” button to add content blocks: text blocks for complaint summary, investigation, root cause, resolution, and preventive action. Add placeholder prompts (e.g. “What did the customer report in their own words?”).
5. Preview and save — Review the template layout, then save. Agents can now document complaints consistently, and you can apply it to existing content in bulk.

How AI helps you create and use this template

Capture faster. Paste a customer email, chat transcript, or call notes into Elium’s AI. It identifies the complaint, affected product, and severity — then drafts a structured record that the handler reviews rather than transcribing manually.

Retrieve smarter. A quality manager asks Elium’s AI: “How many complaints about delivery delays have we received in the last quarter?” The AI returns the relevant complaint records with root causes and resolution outcomes — turning raw data into actionable insight.

Why teams use Elium for complaint handling

Complaint data is only valuable when it is structured enough to analyse. If complaints live in email inboxes or ticket comments, patterns stay invisible. Elium makes complaint data searchable and structured: templates ensure every record captures the same fields, tags enable filtering by product or severity, and AI surfaces trends from historical complaints.

Fnac Darty — 1,800 advisors across 11 call centres — centralised 2,000+ procedures in Elium. By structuring service processes in a single platform, they achieved 80% first-contact resolution and reduced call handling time by 10%, ensuring complaints are handled consistently across every channel and site.