There’s no other issue that has the potential to cement or mar the bond between resellers and vendors as clearly as the issue of warranty. We, journos tracking the channels, find that warranty’s been an issue since a decade ago and it’ll perhaps continue to be 1 for a few years, hence.
But going beyond the realms of traditional channel players – the vendors, the resellers and the distributors – the end customers also figure on the warranty dispute map.
Over the years, the end customers, irrespective of verticals and size, have developed a notion that they have an inherent right for replacement of items. Some things are beyond control of partners, or vendors, when the default’s of a more physical nature like a spoilt screen of a laptop or some damages caused to products due to voltage surge, dust, humidity, lightning strikes, etc.
Moreover, it’s seldom appreciated that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are offered on most products. This is an important option to consider at the point of purchase. SLAs offer technical support coverage over-and-above the basic product warranty and they are priced accordingly. But the fundamentals of SLAs remain only on paper in India, as the issue is hardly understood by the end users.
When early this year, partners in the small Gujarat township of Bhavnagar decided to give a new twist to the basics of replacement by holding “unreasonable” customers “accountable” besides the vendors, it was seen as a case of muscle flexing by the highly sensitized channel members. But take a closer look and one would learn that warranty’s often a double-edged sword, where the defaulters are both, the vendors and the end customers. There is no gainsaying in stating that often the resellers get sandwiched between the two parties.
Going a step further, one could find that warranty in real sense is more like a “product differentiator” which enables a partner to sell a few odd boxes more than his competition, because at the end of the day product lines from vendors hardly differ much.
My good friend Ponnanna Uthappa B, head (Uptime Assurance Services and Marketing) of New Delhi-based Team Computers, refers to warranty expectation as a “demon” in the minds of the customers created by the market and now that the demon has grown up, the going is tough to meet the customers’ expectations. In fact, his thoughts are in sync with those of partners in Bhavnagar.
On the other hand, a critical factor that concerns partners is the turnaround time taken by vendors. Resellers complain of huge losses due to delayed replacement and repairing from vendors and their distributors. Then there are other inherently painful areas, like Dead on Arrival (DOA) and the absence of a transparent warranty policy.
The warranty support or the lack of it has been the cornerstone of a vendor-reseller relationship. Resellers can name several leading vendors on the defaulters’ list. The warranty issue involving Asus made headlines when it was locked in a dispute with Mumbai-based Trade Association for Information Technology (TAIT). A number of other vendors too have been at the receiving end of partners’ ire. In the case of Western Digital, the warranty squabble had assumed an ominous dimension in 2006 when several partners from eastern India threatened to stop doing fresh business with the HDD maker.
There are a few typical situations that give rise to a warranty deadlock in terms of lapses. From the vendor s point of view, it’s the cost factor transportation fee and overhead of running a branch office in small towns.
The partners have painted vendors all black over the vexed dispute. Largely, its vendors actions on warranty that leave much to be desired but there are hiccups on the part of channels and end users too.
There are problem areas like infrastructure at the customers’ end including sudden voltage surges, dust, humidity, and high temperature and overloading. These cause damage to products and lead to warranty concerns at the channel end.
The partners also often tend to sell systems at a less front-end margin and quote annual maintenance contract as hard earning; this leads customers to choose inferior components to reduce the cost of the system.
Therefore, we note that the eternal warranty dispute originates from a plethora of factors. My diagnosis of the malady revolves around the good old theory requiring a holistic approach. And that’s by simply tackling any one of the problems; total normalcy, as we understand by the term, cannot be restored. Rather, the problems ought to be grasped in their entirety and lasting solutions worked out with a deeper sense of reality than has been attempted so far.