After-sales service is the main service associated with tangible products. In general, when speaking of service in a commercial or manufacturing company, reference is made to after-sales service. Similarly, it is an expectation that customers already have, and demand.
In this article I seek to clarify the different after-sales service strategies, depending on each type of product. If you get to guess which one is the most appropriate for your product, you will increase the satisfaction of your customers significantly.
A few weeks ago my newly purchased cell phone broke down. How annoying this after-sales service is for me! I wish this company could take note of these strategies. Your customers will be very grateful.
To choose the correct strategy, we must take into account two factors (according to the Lele and Sheth model):
- The cost of repair, that is, how much it costs to return the product to its optimal state after failure. have it working). Lost production, opportunity costs, reduced productivity, raw material losses, etc.
Going back to my beloved phone, the repair cost would be that of the technician who reviews and repairs the device. Instead, the cost of the failure is, for example, the calls that I could not receive, which may imply lost sales, increased logistics costs due to lack of communication, etc.
Okay, and what do we do with these two costs?
They will determine the 4 strategies of the after-sales service, which are the following:
- Disposable: it is the case of a product in which the cost of replacing it with another is low, and therefore the customer chooses to replace it directly. Nor does its failure generate many additional costs, at most some inconvenience. What to do? In this case, the after-sales service does not make sense, and instead you should work on the reliability of the product itself, ensuring the user a satisfactory shelf life. At the end of this period, the product is discarded and replaced by another. Repairable: its cost of repair can be high, although lower in relation to replacing the product. On the other hand, failure costs are not very significant. This is the case of my phone. What to do? In this case, since the customer will decide to repair it and not replace it, the key is in the ease of getting repair services,and that repair costs are kept low in relation to the cost of the product. Quick response: although its repair costs are high, failure costs can represent several times those of repair, and this is the main reason for the service required, given that its failure can bring large losses to users. What to do? The key here is the immediacy of the after-sales service. Every minute it takes, are losses that the customer accumulates. Working to reduce, standardize, simplify the repair process will make the competitive difference. They should never fail: it is the case that both repair and failure costs are very high, so the product "should not fail." What to do? The key is in prevention.Working in a preventive or predictive maintenance service will warn of any risk of failure and act on time. At the same time, the design must foresee emergency actions (redundancy equipment), so that operability is guaranteed even in the event of a malfunction.
These then are the keys to a good after-sales service. What you should do is identify where your products are, and get to work on the key factors that will increase your reliability to your customers and thus exceed your competition.
