Campus Resolve: A Role-Based College Complaint Management and Automated Escalation System Using Firebase

Abstract

Educational institutions receive concerns related to academic services, infrastructure, administration, facilities, and student welfare. When these concerns are recorded through paper forms, informal conversations, or disconnected communication channels, it can be difficult for students to track progress and for administrators to identify delayed cases. This paper presents Campus Resolve, a web-based college complaint management system designed to organize complaint submission, assignment, tracking, deadline monitoring, escalation, feedback, and reporting within a single application. The implementation in the supplied project archive uses an HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap frontend, an Express and Node.js backend, Firebase Authentication for identity management, and Cloud Firestore for application data. Users are assigned role-based access according to their responsibilities, including student, staff, coordinator, Head of Department (HOD), principal, and administrator. Complaints contain structured information such as category, department, description, priority, location, submission time, status, and a server-calculated deadline. A scheduled backend process checks overdue complaints and escalates unresolved cases from the initial escalation level to the HOD and then to the principal, while generating notifications and action-history records. The application also includes dashboards, satisfaction ratings, and weekly or monthly PDF reports. The archive supports a description of these implemented functions, but it does not contain a documented benchmark dataset or measured evaluation results. Therefore, the paper discusses functional capabilities and identifies the testing required before making quantitative claims about response time, resolution improvement, or user satisfaction. Campus Resolve provides a structured digital workflow for improving visibility and accountability in institutional complaint handling.

Introduction

Campus Resolve is a centralized web-based complaint management system designed to improve the handling of complaints in colleges. Traditional complaint processes often rely on paper forms, emails, verbal communication, and separate departmental records, making it difficult to track complaints, monitor deadlines, maintain accountability, and generate reports.

The proposed system provides a common platform where students and staff can submit complaints, track their status, and receive notifications. It uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and Chart.js for the frontend, Node.js and Express.js for the backend, and Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore for user authentication and data storage.

Campus Resolve supports six user roles: student, staff, coordinator, Head of Department (HOD), principal, and administrator. Role-based access control ensures that users can view and manage only the complaints permitted by their responsibilities. Each complaint receives a unique identification code, a priority level, a target deadline, and a record of actions taken.

The system includes automatic deadline monitoring and escalation. Critical complaints have a two-day deadline, High-priority complaints seven days, Medium-priority complaints ten days, and Low-priority complaints fourteen days. An hourly scheduled task checks overdue complaints and escalates them to higher authorities when necessary. Daily reminders notify coordinators about complaints approaching their deadlines.

Additional features include notifications, complaint history tracking, feedback ratings, analytical dashboards, and weekly or monthly PDF reports. These features help administrators monitor complaint status, resolution rates, departmental performance, and user feedback.

Conclusion

This paper presented Campus Resolve, a role-based college complaint management application that organizes complaint submission, assignment, status tracking, deadline monitoring, escalation, notifications, feedback, analytics, and periodic reporting. The supplied implementation uses a JavaScript-based web interface, an Express and Node.js backend, Firebase Authentication, and Cloud Firestore. Its scheduled workflow checks overdue complaints and escalates them through HOD and principal levels, while notifications and action records support communication and traceability. The project therefore provides a concrete software structure for managing institutional concerns in a centralized way. The available source code supports the description of these functions, but it does not establish quantitative effectiveness or production readiness. Formal functional, security, usability, and load testing should be completed before the system is used for official institutional records. Future work can include automated test coverage, more efficient deadline queries, stronger attachment and report access controls, configurable service-level targets, notification-delivery monitoring, audit-log review tools, accessibility improvements, and integration with institutional identity systems. After collecting real usage data with appropriate privacy safeguards, the system can be evaluated for its effect on resolution time, overdue cases, and user satisfaction. Any intelligent complaint categorization or priority prediction should be treated as a future enhancement unless such a model is actually implemented and validated.

References

[1] International Organization for Standardization, ISO 10002:2018, Quality Management—Customer Satisfaction—Guidelines for Complaints Handling in Organizations. Geneva, Switzerland: ISO, 2018. [2] R. S. Sandhu, E. J. Coyne, H. L. Feinstein, and C. E. Youman, “Role-Based Access Control Models,” Computer, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 38–47, Feb. 1996, doi: 10.1109/2.485845. [3] Google, “Firebase Authentication,” Firebase Documentation. [Online]. Available: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [4] Google, “Cloud Firestore,” Firebase Documentation. [Online]. Available: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [5] OpenJS Foundation, “Node.js Documentation.” [Online]. Available: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [6] OpenJS Foundation, “Express—Node.js Web Application Framework.” [Online]. Available: https://expressjs.com/. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [7] OWASP Foundation, “Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS),” OWASP. [Online]. Available: https://owasp.org/www-project-application-security-verification-standard/. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [8] Google, “Firebase Admin SDK,” Firebase Documentation. [Online]. Available: https://firebase.google.com/docs/admin/setup. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [9] Google, “Cloud Firestore Security Rules,” Firebase Documentation. [Online]. Available: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/security/get-started. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026. [10] npm, Inc., “node-cron: A Task Scheduler in Node.js,” npm package documentation. [Online]. Available: https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-cron. Accessed: Oct. 15, 2026.

Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Mrs. K. Mutheeswari, P. R. Swathy, K. V. Samyuktha. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.