TLDR
Adopt a six‑step, data‑driven remediation to catch local signals, assign owners, measure impact, and stop revenue leakage from ignored complaints. Maintain a single, live incident/revenue register updated weekly and prioritized by lost deals; enforce SLAs, a clear RACI, and weekly triage. Use sentiment and time‑to‑value analytics to sharpen churn risk and link findings to the quarterly planning cycle. Run blameless postmortems within 7–10 days to turn incidents into systemic fixes.
Annual B2B plumbing postmortem — six-step fix for ignored complaints that lost deals
Executive snapshot
A mid-sized plumbing firm with more than fifty staff lost repeat business when customer complaints were acknowledged but not acted on. The core problem: signals arrived but did not change renewal or sales choices. This postmortem prescribes a six-step, data-driven path to catch local signals, assign owners, measure impact, and stop revenue leakage.
Incident metrics (scored and actionable)
Keep one live table that links incidents to revenue impact and owner. Update weekly.
| incident | root | lost_deal | fix | owner | date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| regionPartsDelays | parts supply | 3 | parts-sharing protocol + preferred vendors | Ops Lead | 2025-07-14 |
| warrantyEscalation | hand-off ambiguity | 1 | warranty ladder playbook | Service Mgr | 2025-05-02 |
| communicationGap | no owner update to client | 2 | automated status updates + owner sign-off | Customer Success | 2025-06-18 |
| pricingMismatch | unexpected surcharge | 1 | standard pricing addendum + prework estimates | Sales Ops | 2025-08-05 |
| Notes: "lost_deal" is count of known deals lost tied to the incident. Prioritize items with both high lost_deal and open status. Useful search keywords: complaint routing, SLA playbook, parts logistics, warranty ladder, response time. | |||||
Complaint taxonomy and prioritization
Classify each complaint along four dimensions: channel, severity, product line, and renewal risk. Map those to planning buckets used for budgeting.
- Channels: phone, email, portal, field report.
- Severity: high (service stoppage), medium (major delay), low (minor quality issue).
- Product lines: residential installs, commercial installs, preventive service, warranty.
- Risk mapping: map to renewal risk and sales-stage impact so funding follows risk.
Tag each complaint by channel, severity, product line and map to an annual planning risk bucket to prioritize remediation funding.
- Time-to-value
- Days from first report to confirmed resolution and client notification. Primary SLA anchor.
- Escalation rate
- Share of tickets that move to second-level support or higher within SLA window.
- Sentiment flag
- Simple label (neutral, negative, urgent) from customer text or call notes used as a predictive indicator of churn.
Microcase timelines (short, anonymized examples)
Installation delay: reported with no assigned owner. Escalation occurred at week two. Result: lost renewal. Time-to-value: 18 days. Root: no single accountable owner and no automatic escalation at 48 hours.
Repeated warranty follow-ups: triaged but unresolved for five weeks. Result: churned account. Time-to-value: 34 days. Root: ambiguous hand-off between service and warranty teams.
Parts not available for a commercial install. Temporary fix applied; final resolution delayed. Result: delayed invoicing and lower client confidence; lost add-on sale. Time-to-value: 21 days.
Root causes, frequency, and assigned fixes
| incident | root | lost_deal | fix | owner | date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| noOwnerAssigned | no single accountable owner | 4 | assign SLA + rotating shadow | HR Ops | 2025-03-12 |
| signalNotQuantified | no impact analytics | 2 | decision analytics + sentiment flags | Data Lead | 2025-08-01 |
| partsLogistics | single-supplier dependency | 2 | dual-sourcing + parts pool per region | Supply Lead | 2025-07-20 |
| handoffDelay | unclear SLA between sales and service | 1 | explicit handoff checklist + CRM flag | Sales Ops | 2025-06-30 |
| Considerations: prioritize entries with status "open" and higher lost_deal counts. Searchable keywords: accountability, decision analytics, parts pooling, handoff checklist, SLA enforcement. | |||||
Remediation log and playbook
Remediation combines RACI, SLAs, analytics, and a learning cadence. Adopt blameless language when reviewing failures and assign clear owners for fixes.
Quick remediation snapshot
SLA & RACI: Response = 24 hours; Resolution = 5 business days. Owner = Field Lead; Escalation = Regional Ops → Head of Service. Tie SLAs to quarterly budget playbook reviews.
RACI snapshot: R=Field Lead; A=Ops Director; C=Sales Rep; I=Customer Success.
Analytics: use simple predictive indicators (sentiment, time-to-response, escalation rate). Apply Bayesian updating as resolution events arrive to refine churn-risk probability. This improves early-warning precision and reduces false positives.
Process: standardized playbooks, customer-facing status updates, and a blameless postmortem cadence 7–10 days after a loss. Use learning-loop language to turn incidents into system fixes assigned for the next quarterly plan.
Time-to-value metric: track days from first report → full resolution + customer notified; use this to reset SLA targets and playbook KPIs.
Operational checklist for first 90 days:
- Publish single incident register and name an owner for each open item.
- Implement automated 24-hour response acknowledgement with owner name and ETA.
- Run weekly triage meetings for top-five high-risk complaints.
- Schedule a blameless postmortem within 7–10 business days for any lost deal.
Progress toward six-step remediation:
Current program progress: 45% complete toward owners, SLAs, analytics, vendor changes, playbooks, and learning cadence.
Definitions, category, and tags
- Decision analytics
- Practical AI and statistical methods used to translate complaint signals into prioritized actions.
- Sentiment flags
- Simple labels from text/call notes that act as early predictors of churn or escalation need.
- Category
- sales activation and market visibility
- Tags
-
- competitor ran local ad
- lost deal postmortem
- seasonal pattern changed
- customer complaint ignored
- locked in long term deal
revenue leakage, renewal risk, ownership accountability, SLAs, time-to-value, RACI, playbooks, decision analytics, sentiment flags, churn risk, incident-to-revenue mapping, blameless postmortem, customer success, field lead, service operations, parts logistics, dual sourcing, escalation protocol, automated status updates, data-driven decisions, annual planning, budgeting alignment, lost deals, predictive indicators