A complaint that looked like a support chat
A customer opens the in-app chat. Their transfer is late, they have been charged a fee they did not expect, and they say they are fed up. The agent explains the fee, apologises for the delay and closes the conversation. Was that a complaint? Under most complaint policies, probably yes. In your helpdesk, it is a closed chat with a 'payments' tag.
The same week, a customer leaves a one-star review in the app store, another emails the founder directly, and a fourth replies angrily to a marketing email. Each is handled, more or less. None of them is in the complaints spreadsheet, which gets updated when someone remembers. When the monthly complaints report is due, your compliance lead searches the helpdesk for words like 'unacceptable' and 'complaint' and hopes that is most of them.
Why complaints slip through
Complaints are not a separate channel. They arrive in the same chat window as 'how do I change my PIN', and the support team is measured on closing conversations quickly. Nothing in the helpdesk forces the question 'is this a complaint?' to be answered.
- Tagging is manual and inconsistent between agents.
- Complaints that arrive outside the helpdesk, such as the founder's inbox or social media, are never logged.
- The complaints sheet is separate from the conversation, so letters, notes and dates are copied across by hand.
- Deadlines your policy sets are tracked from memory or a formula in a spreadsheet.
- Root causes are not recorded in a way anyone can count.
What an incomplete log costs
Complaints that were not recognised do not get the handling your policy says they should, and customers notice when a complaint is treated as a chat. Reporting to your partner or your board is based on an undercount, which is uncomfortable if it is ever tested. And the useful signal is lost: if complaints keep coming back to one fee or one provider delay, you want to know that before the next product decision.
What counts as a complaint and what your deadlines are is for your compliance lead and your advisers to decide. The build makes sure the rule you set is applied every time.
The complaints log we set up
What we build sits on top of your helpdesk, such as Intercom, Zendesk or Freshdesk, rather than replacing it.
- Conversations are checked as they close for signs of dissatisfaction, using keyword rules and, if you want, an AI classifier such as Anthropic Claude or OpenAI.
- Likely complaints are put to the agent or a team lead with one question: complaint or not? The answer and the person are recorded.
- Other sources feed the same log: a forwarding address for complaints that reach staff inboxes, app store reviews pulled through the store APIs, and a form for anything taken by phone.
- Each complaint gets a record with the customer, the channel, the date received and the category you define.
- Deadlines from your own policy are calculated and shown, with reminders before each one.
- Acknowledgement and final response letters are drafted from your templates and stored on the record once sent.
- Root cause and outcome are recorded from lists you control, so reports can be counted properly.
| Source | How it reaches the log | Who confirms |
|---|---|---|
| In-app chat and email | Helpdesk API on conversation close | The agent or team lead |
| App store reviews | Store review APIs, matched to a customer where possible | Support lead |
| Staff inboxes | A forwarding address | Whoever forwarded it |
| Phone or social | Short internal form | The person who took it |
A normal week with the log running
Agents work as they do now. When a chat closes and it reads like a complaint, they get a prompt and answer it with one click. The complaints owner starts the day with a list sorted by the next deadline, opens a record and sees the whole conversation, previous contacts and letters in one place.
The monthly report is a filter and an export. The root cause chart shows which product areas generate complaints, which is often the most useful thing the log produces.
Checklist: is your complaints log reliable?
- Complaints are logged in a spreadsheet separate from your helpdesk.
- Agents decide whether to log a complaint with no prompt.
- App store and social complaints are not in the log.
- Deadlines are tracked by memory or a sheet formula.
- The monthly count starts with a keyword search.