Product Reliability and Customer Service

After 30 minutes of being on hold, I wasn’t sure what to expect from customer service for a product reliability issue. The scratchy soundtrack didn’t foretell a great experience either.

Once connected to a company representative, we resolved the issue quickly and satisfactorily. Unfortunately, that was a pleasant surprise. All too often, the frequently repeated “Your call is important to us.” (an Amazon affiliate link) just isn’t true, in my experience.

Did you know that customer service can add significant value to an organization, especially when product reliability doesn’t meet customers’ expectations? Besides providing the team with valuable product reliability performance information for past products, the service team can improve customer loyalty.

The relationship between reliability and customer service

Customer service may include call centers, repair centers, field service agents, and other related activities within an organization. The people staffing these roles often are in direct contact with customers. These customers have a question or problem with your organization’s product.

While not customer service’s sole role, dealing with product failures is often a major role. The design of a product defines the potential reliability performance of that product. The manufacture and shipping of products is also outside the domain of customer service.

Thus, the individuals who design, assemble, and ship products do not (often) have first-hand experience with customer problems. Customer service individuals often have the first and often only data related to actual field reliability performance.

Benefits to reliability development

If you work with product development or assembly, it is a benefit to establish a solid working relationship with the folks in customer service. The data and insights on what is working or not working for customers may provide information for current and future product improvements.

The design team may implement improvements for some products to address issues during the early production time frame. The early reported field failures provide a means to prioritize improvements. A good practice is to alert the customer service team to the suspected or potential issues, so they can properly track and report them.

Finally, the collected knowledge gathered by the customer service organization may provide information on customer use trends, changes to the environment where a product is commonly used, and the types of product features essential to customer satisfaction.

Benefits to the customer and organization

If the development team is often unable to address all known issues discovered or imagined during the development process. Providing the information on what is either likely to fail or may fail under specific situations allows the customer service team to prepare and properly address these issues if they arise. Instead of being surprised by a reported issue with no meaningful solution for the customer, they can efficiently resolve the issue.

Customers with issues resolved quickly tend to become more loyal to the brand. This is partly due to knowing the company stands behind its product and effectively resolves problems. Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty lead to a lower cost of sales.

Happy customers also tend to provide favorable reviews and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. The effect is a larger market share at a lower cost to acquire new customers.

A well-prepared and run customer service team focuses on assisting customers in solving problems. They do not watch the clock to make a quota of x cases per hour.

Customers expect the product they purchased will work as expected. If it doesn’t, they may contact customer service. Depending on how well that engagement goes will affect that customer’s satisfaction and brand loyalty.

The teams working to create a product and address customer problems have the same goal. That goal is to create and support a product that works as expected. Working together, and supporting each other, enables all to benefit.

Additional content on this topic

For more information on setting up an excellent customer service system see the article on Investopedia.com.

You may also enjoy the podcast episode where Kirk and Fred discuss personal experiences in customer service and the good and bad aspects of trying to replace an iPhone battery. Or the episode with a few more war stories and the working with customer service to do problem solving.