Complaint Lifecycle
The complaint record follows the same stage-gated shape as a nonconformity: each stage answers one question, has one owner, and controls what can be edited.
The stages
| Stage | Question | Who acts |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | What did the customer report? | Whoever took the complaint |
| Open approval | Is this a valid complaint, and who owns it? | The approving authority |
| Progress report | What do we know, and what will we do? | Team leader |
| Action tracking | Doing the work. | Action performers |
| Close progress report | What did we do, and was the customer satisfied? | Team leader |
| Close approval | Is that adequate to close? | The approving authority |
| Closed | — | — |
The team leader is the identity used for dynamic task assignment at the open-approval and close-approval stages.
Multi-cycle reports
Both the progress report and the close progress report are multi-cycle. Each time the record re-enters that stage — typically because a close approval was rejected — a new cycle is opened with an incremented cycle number, and previous cycles remain visible as history.
This means a rejected closure is not destructive. The rejected report stays on the record showing what was proposed and why it was not accepted.
Actions
Complaint actions are child records with their own state machine — draft, active, completed, cancelled — mirroring CAPA actions. When an action goes active, its performer receives a task.
Close approval decides between closing and verifying
Close approval is a fork, and one checkbox at the top of the screen decides which way it goes:
Send to monitoring before closing
Leave it off and the screen asks what closing a complaint asks for — the sufficiency information, the assessment category, and whether the actions' effectiveness should be measured afterwards. Press the button and the complaint closes.
Turn it on and those panels stand down; the screen asks instead what a verification needs — what is to be checked, by when, and by whom. The same button then opens a monitoring round and sends the complaint out rather than closing it.
There is one button, and it does what the checkbox says. A monitoring round always returns the complaint to close approval — answered or cancelled — where the approver decides again. See Monitoring and Effectiveness evaluation.
Closing the record
At close approval the approver records:
- Sufficiency info — the judgement of whether the resolution was adequate.
- Assessment category — how the complaint turned out.
- Survey required — whether to follow up with a satisfaction survey. See Survey Management.
On approval the system stamps closed at and closed by automatically.
Coordination with CAPA
If the complaint has linked nonconformities, the closure of a linked CAPA notifies the complaint and can advance its close progress report stage automatically.
Do not close a complaint whose underlying CAPA is still open unless you genuinely intend to. The customer-facing resolution and the systemic fix are separate commitments, and closing the complaint early removes the visible link between them.