Six Steps to Setting a Foundation for Improved Profits
If you could reduce your returns by 25 percent, what kind of impact would it have on your bottom line? After creating a foundation for managing returns, companies such as Philips, AT&T, Best Buy, Hoover, and P&G have reduced returns by more than $100 million. Whether your company has the potential for that kind of savings or not, the impact can be significant. A streamlined product returns management plan saves money, increases productivity and profitability, and improves customer relations.
How to Get a Customer to Leave with the Same Product They Wanted to Return
A failure to approach returns the way you approach sales is causing you to lose customers. I don’t want to sugar coat that fact because, not only is this a serious hole in most business strategies, but this gap in customer service is fixable. When you consider the cost of attracting a new customer—which is five times greater than the cost of keeping an existing one—why wouldn’t you fix something that’s costing you so much money?
By training your staff to effectively manage customer returns, you can reduce incidences by up to 25 percent. Often this means sending the customer home with the very product they intended to return. We’ve developed four simple steps to help you train your employees to best handle returns and ensure customer satisfaction.
How to Double Sales of Extended Service Plans While Creating Loyal Customer Relationships
Extended Service Plans (ESPs) are an important part of a retailer’s success, profitability, and a customer loyalty builder. A successful extended service plan ultimately depends on strategy, program offering, reporting, execution, and processes. These core components dictate whether a retailer achieves optimal financial results and increased customer loyalty -- or -- marginal performance and disappointed customers. If you want to identify the missed opportunities for your organization in maximizing profit and increasing customer loyalty through extended service plans … then read on! Doubling or tripling your current sales of extended service plans is a realistic expectation, when you challenge your organization to think differently.
Product Returns Management: A Major Retailer's Strategy that Delivered Financial Value Across the Entire Organization?
The Product Returns Management Strategy implemented by a nationwide retailer makes a definitive statement about how they choose to run their organization. Your returns strategy not only impacts your customer experience management process -- but also employees on your sales floor all the way up to the your corporate office. Focusing on product returns management (by way of both volume and impact) without alienating end customers requires thoughtful planning, anticipation, strategy, and precise execution!
How Anticipation Led To Reduction in Product Returns
What causes product returns? Could be poor sales transactions, scheduling, delivery, service after-the-sale, or product quality. How about the end customer experience or their inability to operate the product? The reasons are numerous. But, the real question to ask yourself is “how much insight do we have and what do we do with that knowledge”?
How effective are your current Reverse Logistics Strategies? Find out by asking your CEO, CFO, VP of Sales, Heads of Design, Engineering, Packaging, Manual Design, Operations, and Call Center these two fundamental questions:
1) Who manages our Returns Reduction Program as part of your overall reverse logistics strategies? Who is the single person inside our company responsible for following and working on reducing our product returns from the design stage all the way through to return liquidation?
2) When one of our end customers takes one of our products home and has a “perceived” problem, what is the first thing we want that customer to do? What practices have we put into place that ensure this action will actually happen?
If you discover inconsistencies in the answers you receive (or perhaps an inability to get sufficient answers along with supporting data), then read on. The potential for increasing profits via reverse logistics is significant and attainable.
Originally published in Twice Magazine
Returns Management - Creating the Best Experience While Managing Costs
Most dealers view the customer with a return as a "problem customer" and not a "customer with a problem." Any product purchased by a consumer and returned (for any reason) costs everyone involved, including the customer, time and money —a lot of money. Effective returns management benefits consumers, retailers, and manufacturers alike.
Returns Management - Why Are Products Returned?
The problem lies not only in that it costs a lot to process returned products, but in the fact that the product was returned at all. It's been proven that the vast majority of all returns have absolutely nothing technically wrong with them. So why are they returned?
Retailers and manufacturers are jointly responsible for the consumer experience regarding the products they offer, yet rarely do they effectively work together to address the solutions to the consumers' problems that are causing returns.
Returns Management - Reducing Returns By Studying its Causes
The goal of improved returns management should be to develop a strategy to reduce returns that addresses:
- what customers should do when they have a problem;
- determining what caused the real or perceived problem; and
- implementing effective measures to prevent the problem from occurring again.
Returns Management -Keeping the Customer Happy
Here are a few suggestions on how to keep the consumer happy and the product sold:
- Clearly identify what it is you want the consumer to do when they have a question or a problem. Make sure that the product, the information on and in the box, and the salesperson (if there is one) clearly communicate this. And make sure that when the consumer is instructed to do something, like contact a call center, that this is the most efficient way to resolve the problem.
- Determine how you will capture and communicate usability issues that consumers are experiencing. How are these findings communicated throughout the organization’s returns management process? How will they be addressed in future product development, packaging, in-store displays and retail sales product training? Do you have a plan? If not, only sales will decrease, not returns.
- Verify on a frequent basis that the instructions in and on the box and Web site contain up-to-date information. Do you have a stop sheet and a quick-start guide? Are they lost within the instruction package or are they attached to the product so that they cannot be missed?
Returns Management - Effectively Communicating With Consumers
Ask these questions:
Are instructions written at or below a sixth-grade level?
Does your Web site guide the consumer with a problem to easily find the solution?
Are the FAQs updated to reflect the changes in consumer questions throughout the life cycle of the product?
Returns Management - Training Retailers
Create and implement training with retailers for sales and service/return counter associates. Training must include not only the features and benefits of the product but also issues the average consumer may experience in learning how to operate the device. Utilize the consumer information obtained by the call center and Web site to update returns management training on an ongoing basis.
We all know that most products are returned because "they didn't perform as expected." There was a breakdown somewhere along the product development and sales life cycle. Effective returns management ensures that it happens less often in the future than it has in the past. This will only occur through better cooperation and communication of the issues between retailers and manufacturers.
