Warranties are no longer something that only apply to a select few purchases; today many companies offer a warranty as a way to show that they stand behind their products. But as the number of warranties increases, and the number of products that could be eligible for repairs goes up, it’s important for your company to scale up your warranty and repair management process. To improve it, you need to be able to see where the gaps are now.
Step 1: Review
The first step is to review and map your entire warranty process from start to finish. For warranty or repairable items, that actually begins right after the initial sale with the registration process, then continues through the warranty or repair initiation, shipping the product to your facility, completing the repairs according to your policy, and shipping it back.
Step 2: Analyze
It’s important that you are not just looking at how products move through your warranty or repair process, but using data to help you measure the various aspects. The right data can help you analyze:
- What percent of customers are actually registering a product for an eligible warranty
- How many warranty requests you get on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis
- How long it takes products from the initial warranty claim to get back to the customer
- Anomalies in the warranty requests, for example, a single product that has far more warranty requests than another (which could indicate a defect on the vendor side or some other issue with the product itself)
This is the part where many companies get stuck. If you don’t have a comprehensive warranty management module in your reverse logistics software platform, you may not be able to easily run reports and review the data around the entire warranty process. Without that data, it’s very difficult to analyze and make recommendations on what parts of the process could be fixed or streamlined. If you don’t have software that gives you this information, it’s time to get that, and then you can move on to the next steps.
Step 3: Tweak and Test
Once you do know what’s going on in and where the potential gaps or challenges are, the next step is to start tweaking and testing. That could be making an easier product registration to get more eligible purchasers to register for their warranty. It could be streamlining the warranty receiving and repairs internally, or perhaps removing certain products from your store that have a lot of warranty claims.
Step 4: Use Insights to Improve
Finally, continue to monitor your data and the information you can gather to improve your processes and products over time. Data is one of the most valuable things that a company has, but only if it’s used to drive decision-making.
Find out how ReverseLogix platform can help you review, analyze, and improve your warranty and repair process by scheduling a demo today.
