While warranty solutions began as a way to attract customers, their scope and application have seen radical changes over the years and organizations now realize that warranty management is a source of competitive business advantage. It offers a multitude of benefits like faster claims processing, decreased fraudulent claims, better operations management, and increased bottom-line results leading to improved satisfaction of customers and service providers.
However, many fail to understand that effective functioning of warranty is hampered by a silos-based approach. Most organizations adapt the silos approach for warranty without giving it the focus it deserves. The fragmented approach to warranty leads to dissatisfied service providers and customers, greater turnaround time, high operating costs (which otherwise could have been avoided).
A detailed analysis of the holistic approach can easily reveal the strategic impact it bears on each of the value chain functions, such as manufacturing, quality, sales, service, and finance. When the warranty-management process is integrated with all the key business functions, it can turn around the revenue chart of the business and multiply profitability.
A holistic approach to warranty has various benefits:
Improved customer satisfaction – Integrated information ensures greater connectivity, timely information and history recall for customers during product lapses. It, therefore, helps to increase commitment and boosts brand perception and organizational credibility.
Faster claims processing – A closed-loop approach helps in streamlining the claims process and reduces operational discrepancies. It assists in tracking warranties across the product lifecycle and helps in optimizing product pricing while minimizing warranty costs.
Decreased fraudulent claims – Processes and policies can be integrated into business logic. Streamlined processes lead to better visibility of warranty information. Integration minimizes warranty costs while enhancing the early error-detection process, thus widening the scope of improving product quality, well in time.
Decreased operational cost & increased bottom line – An integrated warranty package minimizes process errors that rob organizations of strategic business focus. Product lapse trends can be closely examined for proactive measures to ensure quality and process control. An efficient warranty management solution fosters collaborative solutions, enhances product quality and customer satisfaction, addresses quality concerns, and improves partner relationships, thereby increasing operational efficiency and bottom-line results.
The Client
A global organization that specializes in providing diversified services to domains like home comfort, transportation & preservation of food & perishables, and securing homes & commercial properties.
The Challenge
The organization comprised multiple business units, each of which had diverse business requirements and ran on multiple legacy systems. Due to the market’s demand, the organization accepted additional responsibilities of spreading its services to Europe, North America, Asia, and Lagos. It faced a series of challenges in keeping up with requirements, as it lacked an inventory management system, coupled with ad-hoc retrieval systems, resulting in lack of transparency. All this led to inefficient realization of ROI.
The organization was in need of a robust and comprehensive central solution to standardize the warranty management process.
The Solution
Massive data from all the business centers was integrated into a centralized platform. The analytics solution ensured timely projections across the value chain functions and helped in faster claims processing. It reflected early warnings of failures and identification of root causes to minimize product failures that were impacting the entire product lifecycle. The closed-loop solution transformed performance data into strategic intelligence, directly enhancing operational efficiency, decision making, customer satisfaction, reporting, and communication capabilities to identify and detect issues early. It also minimized warranty costs and enhanced business profitability.
The Benefits
- Increased customer satisfaction & retention
- Better communication and collaboration
- Reduced warranty costs & claims processing errors
- Lesser turnaround time for settlement of warranty claims
- Greater process and operational efficiency
Therefore it is crucial for organizations to ward off the one-dimensional perspective and move towards a holistic approach to warranty solutions. The integrated approach leads to a 360-degree perspective of information, efficient claims processing, better analytics, and reduced manual intervention. It also helps in achieving optimal business results and accelerated warranty management. It enables organizations to run their business functions with strategic alignment and purpose that can streamline their processes, enhance customer satisfaction, brand perception, and maximize scalability.
