Customer expectations have never been higher.
- You can order a car from your phone and track its precise location and ETA to your place of pick-up
- When you order that new whatever from Amazon, again – you pretty can pretty much tell when it left the warehouse, when it arrives at your local UPS center and when it was delivered without looking away from your phone
- You can even order and track your pizza from dough to delivery with ease all from the convenience of your phone.
But what if that phone breaks?
DON’T PANIC – this is just hypothetical, your phone is fine – go ahead check it quick – I’ll wait.
But say that phone or that new device you just received from Amazon does break during the 90, 180, 365 day warranty period – does your vendor offer the same level of visibility into the repair status of your trusty device as you can have on your $12 pizza?
by Charlie Mantione, EVP & Chief Revenue Officer
When a product is sent in for warranty repair, it’s not just the consumer’s problem, it’s your (the manufacturer’s) problem too. If your product breaks soon after it was sold, it might mean that your new customer may not return as a customer again. It may mean they tell 10 friends, or tweet 12,000 strangers, about their now poor experience with your product.
All businesses will have some level of problems with their products, – that’s a given – but that’s not really the issues, it’s HOW you take care of the problem that separates good companies from poor ones.
Delivering a good customer experience when a product requires repair boils down to one key factor; VISIBILITY
The idea of sending your $700 mobile or $6,000 video camera “off to the factory” for repair is unsettling enough but doing it blindly is enough to send a person into deep despair.
Visibility into a product’s repair status isn’t simple…
- It requires you to have a defined repair process with clear steps that have associated timelines so you can deliver an accurate status to your customer.
- You have to continually monitor and improve that process to best manage costs and improve customer satisfaction
- You’ll need a system in place, either software or SaaS, to provide your customers easy visibility to the repair status.
What will all this get you, parity with the pizza company?
Visibility provides much more than that, visibility can help control your customer’s’ perception of you on social media, Tweeters have no problem sharing their frustration and naming (we’re reacting) companies and products by name.
VISIBILITY is a double edged sword – if you have to wait 12 weeks for a part coming from halfway around the planet, you will have an angry customer, but if your customer relies on that device for work or something important this visibility at least gives your customer enough information to make an informed decision about his alternatives. “Bad news” isn’t fun to deliver but if factual it’s much better than a vague “in-process” status with no clear end date in sight.
Your company works so hard to perform a successful product launch and deliver on sales but so much of that goodwill can be lost by missteps during the repair cycle.
Many companies outsource their repair process, your repair partner should have the ability to give complete visibility to your customers. The key reason your repair partner must offer full visibility into the repair cycle is primarily to protect the integrity of your brand.
For more information about how a 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) partner can best provide visibility into your customer’s repairs and in turn protect the good name of your brand, give PanurgyOEM a call at 973-625-4056