Mention the word warranty and you have partners rattling off tales about demanding customers and unrelenting manufacturers.
p____p Warranty policies have always been a hotly debated topic in the channel. For years partners have fought with manufacturers to bring in more sales-friendly policies. And vendors have finally relented. Those vendors who are bound by international warranty guidelines have tied up with their distribution partners to provide extended warranty support. Some charge a nominal fee when extending the company-stipulated warranty time period. And some others have opened service centers in India itself to cater to the warranty requirements of the user and the seller.
p____p So when I now hear of the channel demanding a uniform warranty policy across all products manufactured by one vendor, I get a little confused. And no, this is not because I think the vendors have done enough on the warranty front. In fact, it’s the reverse. As there are still a lot of issues that have to be addressed, I wonder why partners are encouraging manufacturers to take the easy way out.
p____p If a uniform warranty policy is implemented it will limit the scope of service that a vendor will provide for a particular product. The problems that arise out of a faulty CD-ROM drive are very different from those of a malfunctioning monitor or motherboard or a hard disk drive. So what does a company that manufactures all these products do?
p____p A uniform warranty policy will make manufacturers complacent, as it will take away the incentive to provide a differentiation factor by value adding to a product. A case in point being the Seagate-Samsung HDD saga. Do you think if Seagate and Samsung had the same warranty policy for their respective HDDs, the Peace of Mind insurance program would ever have been formulated? This is the only country in the world where Seagate has implemented such a policy, which in the end has benefited both the partner as well as the customer.
p____p So I would say, take a long-term view and keep the market open. Let vendors compete with each other to provide the best warranty support and post-sales service they can. For there is only one sole beneficiary of this move, and that is you, the partner.