Gone are the days when companies focused on sales and sales alone. These days they value the overall customer experience throughout the product lifetime. One powerful tool for this is warranty—an assurance that the product will perform excellently for a given period of time, and if at all it fails on some count the company will take care t o mend it at their own cost. Thus warranty is at the same time a marketing tool, a claim to quality, and a tool for sustained customer bonding.
However, warranty management is very complex and expensive. High warranty costs, high rate of fraudulent claims, and customer dissatisfaction can become detrimental to the company. As a result of inefficient processes and ungainly warranty management systems the company’s aftermarket revenues will shrink.
An answer to this threat, new-age warranty management solutions are available as light weight, cloud based modules that can be configured for custom purposes. They provide unprecedented advantages like:
- Integrated solution for warranty administration, claims management, fraud prediction and detection, service contracts, part returns and supplier recovery, and extended warranties
- Automate all processes related to claims management
- Reduce expenses by minimising manual intervention
- Foresee and eliminate fraudulent claims
- Provide valuable data and analytics to improve supplier recovery and grow the quality of products
Industrial surveys show that powerful warranty management solutions can bring in many benefits like:
- Reduce warranty processing time by 30 percent and warranty costs by 20 percent
- Increase supplier recovery by 50 percent
- Eliminate claims fraud. They build patterns and models based on existing data and can identify anomalous claims as potentially fraudulent. Such claims shall be recommended for individual scrutiny by experts, thus saving the company from being duped.
- Track the whole product life cycle, identify source of defective parts, and thus facilitate quick corrective action
- Map the whole array of parts to respective suppliers, thus making supplier recovery quick and easy
- Link the entire network of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, service agencies, and end customers. Give them ownership, responsibility and a platform to voice their feedback. This improves transparency and traceability of the system, and leads to quick quality growth.
These web-based, full-lifecycle warranty management solutions bring together OEMs, suppliers and service channel partners in a real-time collaborative environment. The resulting streamlined processes, improved profitability, and positive customer experience leads to customer satisfaction and enhanced brand value.
If your warranty management system continuously fails to meet your growing business needs, if your customers are complaining about long warranty settlement cycles, if you are still relying on dated legacy systems that have severe data challenges and integration gaps, realize that time is up for you to pause and consider a new powerful warranty management solution. We would recommend any solution that is cloud-based, light weight, modular, and responsive to desktop and mobile platforms. But the problem is yours, the money is yours, and the solution should make you happy. Therefore, consult experts in the domain and do some good research before you invest in anything.
Ashley j. is a business architect worked in marketing department with top notch companies and has over 8 years of experience in content management solution, Advertising Technology, ad server software. She has also worked in several process improvement projects involving multi-national teams for global customers in warranty management and mortgage.