Handling Complaints and Adverse Reactions.

This is the most undesirable event for any company and a medical representative. And any occurrence of such an undesirable event mean the loss of confidence in the quality of the medicine and it may have its own chain reactions on similar other products of the company. Therefore the control, management, treatment of customer complaints and adverse reactions is the most critical job. Normally, this is handled by one of the most responsible officers of the organization. Medical representative is one of the elements of that customer complaint managment and management and addressal of the adverse reactions.

The word customer need to be defined for the medical representative. Customer means the distributors, retailers, the doctors, other intermediaries namely hospitals, dispensaries etc. and definitely the end consumer..the patient. Adverse reactions means that the medicine has not served the end use intended therapeutic functions and thus has become a source of risk to life or injurious to health in any manner. Normally such complaints are brought to the notice of the doctors, government authorities, hospitals and surely and definitely to the organization. If the adverse reaction of the medicine is non-fatal, then the consequences are of little less magnitude and when for any reason the adverse reaction means the fatality, that time the whole nation, media and other institutions swing into actions for remedial and punitive actions. In such cases, normally a medical representative is not associated for any kind of supporting role to the organization. Such matters are handled and managed by the authorities having competence and knowledge and background information on the batch etc.

Customer complaints may be on any of the following :

a. empty pockets.

b. empty bottles.no medicine or less medicine.

c. foreign particles.

d. broken tablets.

e. colour variations.

f. size variations.

g. missing labels; wrongly inserted labels; wrongly applied labels;

h. excess deliveries

i. short deliveries;

j. non availability of the medicines on the retail outlets.

k. distributors not responding effectively;

l. company not responding to supply demand
m. other complaints of any kind.
Any customer complaints requires its timely and effective communication. The role of the medical representative in resolving a complaint must be spelled out in the organization's procedure. The process flow suggested is as under :
receive customer complaint.
fill up the form : hard copy or soft copy.
transmit to the senior.
communicate and do follow up.
as per directions provide information or solutions or results to the customers : sorry/ replacements/ information etc. as relevant.
During adverse reactions, the role of the medical representative need to spelled out in the product recall, adverse customer complaint handling and emergency preparedness and response and a training to that effect must be provided and effectiveness of that training established. A mock product recall or a mock adverse reactions handling should be done and it should be tested uniformly upto the medical representative distributed all India basis.
Means of communication as available to the company and medical representative should be on and effective for 24 hours during customer complaints and adverse reactions handling.

drbmsharma.