Randomly Tweaking The Old Warranty Processes And Tools Causes Operational Mesh & Revenue Loss

By Author: Rakesh Kumar
Total Articles: 33
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Warranty Management is a right opportunity to maximize customer service experience. Most of the best-run companies believe in automating warranty but often tend to take wrong steps towards such process automation. They bank upon making changes in their existing systems to cater to warranty processes and at the same time try to accomplish the entire warranty process rather perfectly. The irony however is that tweaking your existing applications/systems to suit service and warranty management requirements or building a home-grown tool is a non-standard and futile exercise. In the short-run, it may look to be an easy and cost effective alternative but it actually creates a mesh in the service operations and causes substantial revenue loss.
Warranty data takes the form of multiple versions of truth floating at multiple touch-points and loses its relevance. So, when the actual need to analyze the data arises, every data source shows a different picture, and warranty management on the contrary becomes a painful chapter of Service life-cycle Management.
This is because many companies still believe in the age old traditional ...
... methods of capturing warranty status of the products and unconsciously add to the warranty costs. They hang up to age-old, primate systems and build a disoriented approach to what they call warranty management. While all manufacturers bear the pain of rising warranty costs, manufacturers from the Mobile Telecommunication, Home Appliances, Consumer Electronics, HVAC, and similar other industries bear the brunt of it, primarily because of the following reasons:
You have to bear inflated costs of managing more than one integrated systems
In the absence of one end-to-end warranty management system you lose the competitive edge
Scattered warranty and service data and multiple platforms of information causes confusion & delays
Ever rising complexity which increases the number of potential problems in the product & service offerings
Difficulty in warranty claim management & settlement with multiple vendors and service providers
These factors call to follow a strong warranty management process, failing which, it becomes difficult for the companies to align and justify the warranty costs of their products. While some of the best run companies have leveraged the power of warranty management by implementing tried and tested end to end warranty and claim management software, there are others who feel contented by randomly tweaking their warranty management tools and process. This not only burns their pockets by the additional costs incurred by such tweaking, but also increases the tendency of mis-managing warranty claims and increasing cost. The points below highlight how difficult it becomes to handle when you keep tweaking the tools and warranty processes and do not go for complete automation which is robust & reliable:
a.Incoherent and intensive processes
b.Poor data quality that affects customer-support and timely decisions
c.Scattered warranty and service applications toiling over legacy systems
d.Little collaboration amongst the stakeholders leading to confusion and dissatisfaction
e.Data residing at multiple systems and data centers leading to delayed and dis-oriented information flow

By the time such companies realize the magnitude of the harm done due to the lack of streamlining and automating warranty processes, they use ad hoc approaches to measure and manage whatever in their purview. Researches have shown that the best-in-class service companies are leading the industry, and to preserve their best-in-class status, they consider using Warranty Management applications that enable them to:
Create, administer and track warranties from a central location with user-defined business rules
Track warranty and part claims for OEMs and 3rd party service providers
Reduce warranty claim cycle-time and inaccuracies
Track product history and revisions in service
Without an end-to-end automated solution, companies loose thousands of dollars in revenue leakage and managing warranty becomes a futile process. You can control these leakages by implementing a single robust system takes care of all the warranty related issues including inventory control, forward & reverse logistics, service claims, spares, etc. Post sales service and warranty may seem to be just another non-core function to many but it stands to be a strategic differentiator in the ever competitive environment where most of the companies have almost similar products to offer.

Rakesh Kumar is a business consultant of Zed Service. Zed Service is leading Field Service Management Software in India. Zed Service has lots of innovative features including Warranty Management System, Claim Management Software etc. To get more information about warranty management system, Visit our website www.service-management-software.net now!