When was the last time you reviewed your current warranty and repairs processes and procedures? If it’s been a while, you could be missing out on opportunities to streamline your operations, reduce total costs, and impress your customers. Having a good warranty and repair program ensures that defective products are repaired and back in the hands of your customers as soon as possible, and that you can track what is happening every step of the way.
Gather Good Information
One of the first steps in a streamlined and efficient warranty repair system is the ability to gather and analyze data. That starts with being able to identify the product or part causing a failure, and aggregate data about warranty claims across your entire company or product line to spot patterns. Next you need detailed information from your team about the primary complaints for warranties or repairs, the root cause of the problem, and what action they took to correct it.
Validate Warranties
Warranties are a great way to show your customers that you stand behind your product, but in order to remain profitable, you must be able to validate that claims fall under your warranty provisions. It’s critical that you have a way to capture accurate information, pre-authorize warranties, verify and approve claims as they come in.
Automate What You Can
If every warranty claim requires someone to manually look up a customer’s information, validate the product purchase, collect information related to the complaint or issue, and approve a warranty request, you are wasting valuable staff time. To speed things up and improve efficiencies, automate parts of your process with a reverse logistics platform that can look up order information, provide a warranty authorization, and send shipping information directly to your customers so they don’t need to call in.
Track Parts and Progress Simultaneously
If your warranties require new parts, waiting around for those parts to come after a warrantied product arrives is a waste of time. Instead, find a system that can automatically identify needed parts so they are ordered and ready to go as soon as it arrives. These systems should also track progress on repairs from multiple departments simultaneously so everyone can be working on their piece at the same time, rather than a linear process that only allows one group to work when another is done. This significantly cuts out repair time and gets the product out of your hands and back in the customer’s hands sooner.
Consolidating your warranty returns and repairs systems as part of an overall reverse logistics management effort can streamline the entire process, managing it from registration and claims to parts returns, supplier recovery, and analytics. By having one platform that does it all you eliminate duplicate or manual work in the process. Find out how ReverseLogix can provide that efficiency for you.