Assessment Category Definitions

Assessment categories classify the outcome of a complaint — the conclusion reached at close approval. They answer "how did this turn out?", not "what was it about?".

Because assessment is recorded at closure while the complaint category is recorded at intake, reporting across the two shows something neither shows alone: which kinds of complaint are being resolved well and which are not.

Purpose

• Outcome reporting. How many complaints were justified, how many were not, how many were resolved by goodwill.
• Fairness. A record of the judgement made, so closures can be reviewed rather than taken on trust.
• Trend detection. A rising rate of "justified" outcomes in one complaint category is a stronger signal than complaint volume alone.

Fields

• Code
  Auto-generated and unique. Read-only once the record exists.

• Name
  The assessment title. Example: Justified, Partially Justified, Not Justified, Resolved by Goodwill, Outside Scope.

• Description
  Optional detail describing when this assessment applies. Worth filling in — assessment is a judgement call, and the description is what keeps different approvers consistent.

• Parent category
  Optional. Makes this a sub-category. The system prevents circular references.

• Active
  Inactive categories are no longer offered at close approval.

A typical list

Assessment	Meaning
Justified	The complaint was valid and something was genuinely wrong.
Partially Justified	Part of the complaint was valid.
Not Justified	Investigation found no fault on our side.
Resolved by Goodwill	No fault established, but resolved in the customer's favour.
Outside Scope	The issue is real but not ours — a third-party carrier, for example.
Withdrawn	The customer withdrew the complaint.

Keep this list short. Unlike complaint categories, assessment categories are a judgement scale, and a long scale produces inconsistent judgements.

Authorization and Access Control

Creating and editing assessment categories is restricted by role-based permissions and is normally reserved for quality administrators.

caution

"Not Justified" closures deserve periodic review. A high rate of them may mean the complaints genuinely are unfounded — or that the assessment stage is being used to make inconvenient records go away.