Defining Complaints and Appeals
According to ISO/IEC 17000, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles, we’d like to cite the international community’s definitions with examples:
Appeal
An appeal is a “request by the person or organization that provides, or that is, the object of conformity assessment to a conformity assessment body or an accreditation body for reconsideration by that body of a decision it has made relating to that object”.
Examples of appeals might be:
- Requesting evidence of assigned value determination.
- Review of Normalized Error (En) calculation.
Complaint
A complaint is an “expression of dissatisfaction, other than appeal by any person or organization to a conformity assessment body or an accreditation body relating to the activities of that body, where a response is expected”.
Examples of complaints might be:
- The test you ordered did not get to your lab on the promised date.
- Our instructions were not clear.
- The results not delivered as promised.
If you have any questions or concerns about one of our tests, we need to hear from you. We will be more than happy to discuss any issue you may have concerning any aspect of our process including traceability and determination of outliers.
Our objective is to design and operate our tests to provide the highest quality and value to our participant laboratories and their accrediting bodies. Artifacts are chosen to provide adequate range, uniformity and accuracy to provide tests that are easy to use and meaningful. Assigned values and measurement uncertainty are determined by using expert laboratories.
We take your concerns very seriously. We will address all complaints or appeals through our corrective action system. This will include investigation of cause, corrective action proposal and communication of the proposed resolution to concerned parties. PTI has an internal procedure P7.7.1 to handle all complaints and appeals.
Investigations and decisions on appeals do not result in any discriminatory actions.
Please feel free to call us at 352-899-2064.
Email to:
quality@proficiencytestinginc.com
technical@proficiencytestinginc.com
Or use the “Contact Us” tab on our website.