Business is booming!! We have basically made a whole department dedicated to marketing trying to get the word out all around the world. The decision to add marketing staff was well thought out... out of all our weekly meetings which one has the most to do and highest probability of not getting done... the answer was easy.
We were going to start small and just get a few hours of help, now we have two people dedicated to helping us stay on top of all things marketing. We have schedules and pre-planned marketing material, we have expanded to more social media platforms and have our events organized and calendared. Our core team has been shouldering the marketing aspect and now we can finally let it go and grow into a beautiful system that we will water and nourish so everyone can enjoy the fruits of our labor... that being parts shown and purchased around the world.
One of my favorite things to do is to grow things, plants mostly, but also businesses. It's been quite rewarding watching this business grow. Fostering the direction and mindset of profitability by reducing waste for one, but by being organized enough to prevent waste in the first place is where my heart lies. When you plant the right plants together, they benefit each other creating a micro climate in the soil as well with the sunlight. It's all about organizing and timing, in anything you do.
That mindset applies to customer satisfaction as well. If we are having a recurring complaint then the source needs to be found. Tightening the net here will prevent future complaints and potential warranty claims, which will keep our time spent on warranties down so we can spend that extra time on quality control.
Here’s what a warranty claim really costs us, not just in parts, but in time:
1) phone call - time spent hearing/explaining
2) receiving returned merch-time spent logging item
3) examine the warranty and RGA information
Prior to the RGA process some people would even forget to add their names to the box much less why they were returning it- I mean we are good (and I'm sure they talked to somebody) - but we aren't psychic. I mention this because we are talking about a time sink... trying to figure out who sent in parts and why would add 30 more minutes between two employees. We are talking about the cost of a warranty here, and these are the costs, not just the cost of the actual parts in question. Time is a big expense, our biggest single expense in fact... the one thing we cannot recover is time.
4) Customer phone call to explain findings and warranty decision
5) Follow-up warranty invoice to log the findings (for our quarterly reports)
6) Package or pull parts to return to the customer
7) Ship return package to customer
A full circle; hour and a half job per warranty, makes us want to cut that time down as much as possible. These are the small things we evaluate to find efficiencies and inefficiencies that can add up to big costs or savings. This is why we invest so much time in quality control, to prevent any reason for return.