Repair, Refurbishment and Return: Does Your Customer Expect Failure?
Category: Service Management
Does your organization have full visibility into what happens when a customer has a failing part or product? As a service leader, you may be thinking that everything is fine because your outsourced partner is efficiently managing the customer’s returns and repairs. Or, your operations team is on the job and working around the clock to fix those parts/products and ensure the customer gets another one fast. But what if this isn’t happening to the standard that you assume, or worst yet, to the standard that your customer expects?I am excited to tackle the topic of Repair, Refurbishment and Returns as it relates to service spare parts and products, and have launched a research survey to better understand the challenges and best practices tied to this important operational process. Throughout our research over the past few years, we have seen that the customer expects faster, consistent and more reliable service. However, as seen in our State of Service Management research (January 2012), organizations polled reported that they were just above average when it comes to delivering a consistent service experience to the customer (3.5 on 1-5 scale, 1-Poor 5-Excellent).
Can your organization afford to be just above average when customers have options in an ever more crowded service landscape? For this reason, organizations can’t allow any aspect of their service brand to suffer from inefficiency. The repair, refurbishment and return operations are not immune to this need to improve.
Often times the repair and return operations are thought of as a negative situation due to the fact that a part or product broke or is not running optimally. However, these operations are viewed by the Best-in-Class as an opportunity to leverage this customer interaction and maximize the value of the service opportunity. And as customers attempt to pull every last drop of value out of their equipment/parts in a down economy, top performing service organizations are able to manage the repair and return processes to avoid customer dissatisfaction, cultivate new revenue streams and cut out costly inefficiencies.
If the repair, refurbishment and return operations within your business are not running as smoothly as you (your customers) would like or if you are performing at a Best-in-Class level and would like to share, please participate in my survey.
We have already had over 100 service organizations take part and would like to better understand what you are doing well, where you can improve, or why you chose to outsource your repair/return operations. For participating in this 15-20 minute survey you will receive a complimentary copy of the findings upon publication in early April 2012.










