Connected Customer Experience

Last week, Mize hosted a webinar titled “Benchmarks to Optimize & Maximize Service Contract Sales”.  The webinar presented the results of  study conducted among service executives and warranty professionals who are involved in marketing and selling service contracts and extended warranty (SC/EW) programs. Representatives of 96 companies participated, providing an elusive look into how they’re configuring their contracts, sales and marketing approaches, results realized and planning for future expansion of this customer-connecting, revenue-generating profit center.

Eric Arnum is the editor of Warranty Week, an online newsletter for warranty management professionals. Since 2003, Eric Arnum has been publishing reports on product warranties, extended warranties, and claims rates in various industries. Warranty Week has gained a broad following among manufacturers, retailers, servicers, and insurance professionals.

The growing importance of Warranty and Service Contracts for Manufacturers

Over the past several decades, durable equipment manufacturers have experienced an evolutionary shift with respect to how they manage service interactions after the original product sale. Manufacturers originally considered the warranty as a necessary cost they had to contend with in order to keep the customer happy, resolve product failures, and obtain critical data required to improve product quality.   Manufacturers no longer view the provision warranty and aftermarket service as a cost of doing business that must be controlled but as an opportunity to add value, obtain critical insights to drive product innovation, and generate incremental revenue and profits.

The results from Strategies For Growth℠‘s (SFG℠‘s) 2019 Warranty Chain Management (WCM) Tracking Survey Update reveal that nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondent organizations currently offer an extended warranty agreement or service contract to their respective customers. In fact, this percent would actually increase to nearly three-quarters (i.e., ±73%) when reallocating the “don’t know/unsure” responses into the “yes/no” categories (Figure 1).

Mize was a proud sponsor of the 10^th Annual Extended Warranty & Service Contract Innovations conference. The event was held in Nashville, TN from September 18^th to September 20^th, 2019.  There were over 20 speakers from leading OEMs, Service companies, and Solution providers including but limited to AmTrust, Electrolux, Ford, GE, GM, Mize, OnPoint, Samsung, Stryker, and Stulz.

Unlike most other solutions, which are designed to integrate with passenger car dealer management systems or retail point of sale software, the new Mize offering is aimed at manufacturers engaged in the business-to-business sale of commercial service contracts.

This week, Mize Inc. released the latest version of its Service Contracts Management solution at the Extended Warranty & Service Contract Innovations Conference in Nashville.