Want to Offer Product Warranties? Make Sure You Have This in Place First
There is a lot of competition for retailers out there today, which means your company needs to come up with new ways to appeal to customers. One of the ways many companies choose to do that is with some kind of warranty. A good warranty signals to your customer that they can trust your products, and it removes the risk for someone who is making a purchase, especially if it’s a big purchase.
The challenge on your end as a retailer is that if you’re planning to offer warranties, you must have an effective way to manage them. Failing to have an adequate warranty management software program can make the process very difficult, leading to unhappy customers and higher costs for you and your team. Here’s what you need to know about getting warranty management software.
It’s All About the Features
The best warranty management systems are ones that help you streamline the entire process of customer and product warranties from start to finish. That means your system needs some key features:
- Returned materials authorization (RMA): allow customers to enter information about the product they are planning to return so you can track the item from the time it leaves the customer’s hands to the time you finish repairs or replace the product.
- Order verification: track the validity of orders and ensure you are only repairing or replacing items that were legitimately purchased by a customer to prevent fraud.
- Shipping tracking: track items shipped back to your facility and shipped out to the customers.
- Parts inventory: keep track of all the parts needed to repair your products so you can order parts if necessary to quickly complete warranty claims and send the product back.
- Vendor management: track information on vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers about product recalls, parts availability, and repairs.
The Importance of Reporting
In addition to these features, it’s important to have a warranty repairs management system that provides accurate and simple reports to help you make better business decisions. You should definitely be tracking a variety of factors related to warranty claims, including:
- Average time for warranty claims to be resolved
- Number of warranty claims per month, quarter, year
- Warranty claims by product
- Warranty claims by supplier/manufacturer/vendor
- Total cost of warranty repairs
- Customer satisfaction with warranty repairs
- Team and process efficiency for warranty repairs
All these data points can help you identify bottlenecks in the process, alert you to products that are low quality or frequently in need of repairs, or help you discover specific brands, vendors, or suppliers that are selling you defective or low-quality products so you can make changes if necessary.
Find the Right Warranty Software
Whether you’ve already launched a warranty system and learned that you need more help, or you’re planning to start one soon, talk to ReverseLogix today to see how our software solution can make it easy to provide better warranty services.
