Leveraging AI in Complaints Management with 4CRisk

Introducing Our Author

In this blog, Shwetha Shantharam, AVP and Product Head at 4CRisk.ai, joins us to look at how organizations can leverage AI to accelerate Complaints Management to ensure continuous improvements and increased operational efficiencies. She reviews the step-by-step process in a Complaints Management Program and discusses how AI can be leveraged. With more than 20 years’ experience, Shwetha has focused the last 5 years on powering up products for regulatory, compliance and risk teams with AI.  

What is the Complaints Management Process and How Does AI Help?

Complaints Management programs are essential for organizations to protect their brand and reputation, comply with regulations and ensure stakeholder trust. The process starts with receiving and recording complaints from multiple sources, which may span customers, partners or third parties. The next steps move through analysis and finally to resolution and communication of the solutions to the complaint. A strong Complaints Management process helps reduce risk and strengthen compliance for the organization. It can prevent the loss of a customer, partner or third-party due to a negative experience and continuously improves by identifying systemic issues to prevent future complaints.

AI can help organizations assess complaints in a structured, risk-aware, and regulator-ready manner. Specialized language models can ingest complaint data, automatically classify complaints by theme, jurisdiction, product, and risk area, and map them to applicable regulatory obligations, internal policies, and controls. AI can further identify root causes, assess regulatory impact, detect systemic issues and trends, and document outcomes with a full audit trail, enabling faster remediation, consistent decision-making, and defensible regulatory reporting.

Let’s investigate the Step-by-Step Process in an AI-powered Complaints Management Program and how AI can be leveraged.  

Step 1: Intake the complaint from various channels

During the first step in the process, a stakeholder, who may be a customer, a partner or a third-party, submits their complaint through various channels that may include email, telephone, social media, or a web support portal.

Leverage AI:  4CRisk AI can consume and automatically classify complaints by theme, jurisdiction, product, and risk area, and map them to applicable regulatory obligations, internal policies, and controls. Many organizations also use specialized products to monitor social media mentions and review sites in real-time, automatically converting them into support tickets, 24/7. For phone complaints, AI-powered transcription can capture the exact wording and tone of the customer. Finally, AI chatbots can guide customers through the filing process, ensuring all necessary information (order numbers, product, location, dates, etc.) is collected upfront.

Step 2: Triage the complaint to determine its priority

The next step in the process is to sort and categorize the submission to determine its type and urgency.  

Leverage AI:  4CRisk leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect the urgency of the complaint and categorize complaints with a higher level of accuracy and speed than manual monitoring and tagging to ensure it is sent to the right team.  

Step 3: Investigate the problem to determine the root cause

During this step the right team determines the root cause of the problem to determine if the complaint is valid and what went wrong. Team members use policy, procedures and rules to determine the best way to resolve the problem.  

Leverage AI: Most organizations leverage a variety of processes and tools to conduct a thorough root cause analysis. which may vary depending on the case. 4CRisk can help in this step in several ways. Having extracted, classified and summarized complaints to identify the core problem and systemic issues, 4CRisk can relate these to regulations, policies and trends, and document outcomes with a full audit trail.  This supports faster root cause analysis and remediation, consistent decision-making, and defensible regulatory reporting. AI can provide a consolidated picture of past correspondence to give the team full context. AI can determine if this specific complaint is part of a larger, emerging trend before humans even notice the pattern.  

Step 4: Determine the Solution, Communicate and Follow-up

In this fourth step, team members communicate the resolution to the complainant, which may span a wide range of solutions, all within the bounds of the organization’s policies and procedures.  After the resolution is provided, the team member may check back to ensure the customer is satisfied with the outcome.

Leverage AI: 4CRisk AI products can suggest language, consistent with the organizations policies and procedures, for personalized, empathetic responses based on the specific complaint, saving team members’ time. AI can suggest the most effective "next best action" (e.g., "Customers with this issue are 40% more likely to stay if offered a 20% discount code"). During the follow-up process, AI can trigger a short survey, and if the AI detects that the sentiment is still negative, after resolution, it can flag the account for a human-in-the-loop follow-up from a team member.

Step 5: Continuous Improvement for Your Complaints Program

During this step program elements are analyzed to determine how to make improvements in people, process and products to continue to gain trust and retain customers. At this step you’ll need to ensure your program is complying with regulators and can provide the evidence to show how it is compliant.  

Leverage AI: 4CRisk AI can summarize systemic issues and trends and provide defensible regulatory reporting. AI can use data to predict future complaint volumes and types, allowing for better staffing and resource allocation. AI can provide analysis. An example might be to ask AI to "summarize the top 3 reasons for product delays this month," providing actionable insights instantly. AI is especially good at spotting trends in large volumes of information and then providing analysis and summaries for strategic planning .  

Summary

Organizations can power-up their Complaints Management programs with AI. 4CRisk products and Specialized language models can help organizations dramatically improve the complaint management process and ensure the organization stays compliant with regulations, and its own policies and procedures. 4CRisk can help programs continuously improve by providing analysis of problems by theme, jurisdiction, product, and risk area, and map them to applicable regulatory obligations, internal policies, and controls. Organizations can protect their brand and strengthen trust with customers, partners and third parties with faster remediation, consistent decision-making, and defensible regulatory reporting.

Check out these related blogs and resources  

• https://www.4crisk.ai/post/priorities-take-action-with-ai-regulatory-compliance-and-intelligence
  

• https://www.4crisk.ai/post/regulatory-compliance-how-to-gain-high-roi-on-ai

• https://www.4crisk.ai/post/what-leaders-should-consider-when-buying-ai-powered-regulatory-change-management-solutions