Complaint emails from customers' quality teams arrive with photos, lot labels and reject reports. An AI agent extracts the part, lot, defect and quantity, checks shipments, opens an NCR with a severity level and acknowledges the customer within the hour.
Typical results
≈4 hrs/wk
Quality engineer time saved on complaint intake
≈70%
Fewer 8D reports past their due date
100%
Of complaints matched to a shipped lot or flagged
Figures reflect typical results for this kind of automation.
The challenge
Customer complaints arrive by email in every format: photos of a cracked housing, a lot label, a reject report from an appliance maker's incoming inspection. The quality engineer sorts them by hand, checks shipping records and types the nonconformance report, so acknowledgements take a day or two and 8D deadlines slip.
Before and after
Hours from complaint email to acknowledgement
−97%Engineer hours per week on complaint intake
−67%8D reports past due per quarter
−71%The automation
Complaint emails sent to the quality inbox are read by an AI agent, which extracts the part number, lot, defect type and quantity from the text, photos and attached reports. It checks the lot against shipment records, opens a nonconformance report with a severity level and routes it to the quality engineer for that customer. The customer gets an acknowledgement with the NCR number and the 8D due date, and open NCRs are chased before each deadline.
How it works
- 01
Complaint email arrives
A customer's quality team emails the complaint inbox with photos, lot labels or a reject report attached.
- 02
AI extracts the details
The AI agent reads the text, photos and attachments and pulls out the part number, lot, defect type and quantity.
- 03
Lot checked against shipments
The lot is matched to shipment records to confirm the ship date and quantity, and unmatched lots are flagged for the engineer.
- 04
NCR opened and routed
A nonconformance report is opened with a severity level and assigned to the quality engineer responsible for that customer.
- 05
Acknowledgement and chasers
The customer gets the NCR number and 8D due date, and the engineer is reminded before each containment and 8D deadline.
Starts from
- Customer complaint emails
- Photos and reject reports
- Shipment records
Delivers
- NCR with severity level
- Acknowledgement with 8D date
- Deadline reminders
The impact
Customers get an NCR number within the hour instead of one or two days, which matters to appliance makers that score suppliers on response time. Quality engineers spend about 4 fewer hours a week on intake, and 8D reports past due drop from around 7 a quarter to 2.
Questions about this automation
How does the agent decide the severity level?
Severity follows the plant's own rules in a settings table, for example safety-related defects, line stops at the customer and quantity thresholds. The agent applies those rules to the extracted details, and the quality engineer can change the level on the NCR, with the change logged.
What if the email is unclear or the lot is not found?
The NCR is still opened, marked incomplete, and the engineer gets a list of the items the agent could not read or match. The acknowledgement still goes out on time and asks the customer for the missing detail, such as a clearer label photo, so the response does not wait on it.
Which systems does it connect to?
It reads the shared quality inbox in Outlook or Gmail, looks up shipments in the ERP and creates NCRs in the quality system or a structured sheet. This is a multi-step build, usually rolled out in stages, beginning with extraction and NCR creation before acknowledgements and deadline chasing.