It’s time to breathe new life into the product life cycle.
Every day customers return thousands of video and broadband devices. The reasons vary but the results are the same: negative impact on your brand and your profitability.
When it comes to keeping customers connected to the shows they love, video and broadband products are a modern necessity. Video is projected to account for 82% for internet traffic by 2022 with a growing share taking the form of live streaming. This means that telecommunication companies are under more pressure to keep their broadband products running at all times.
iQor’s 20-year partnership with a popular video and broadband provider has led us to refine, and re-refine, our repair and screening processes to provide world-class product life-cycle solutions by aligning innovation and automation with quality and experience. Here are a few actions we are taking to help companies break through the line of competition and keep customers connected to what they love:
Designing with Intention: Extend the Life of Products and Save Millions
To extend the life of products, technicians get tough in our ISO 1705-certified Failure Analysis Laboratory (FAL). Returned video and broadband devices are cycled through extreme thermal shocks, freezing temperatures and high humidity. They are dropped, rattled, and tested for every possible environment and situation, including the bumpy ride the unit takes on the truck to the repair center, and back to the home of the customer. Technicians capture and analyze this information to resolve issues and recommend proactive repairs and design to the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The Failure Analysis Lab helps keep parts internal to the product’s ecosystem and creates opportunity for longer lasting products, saving companies millions from new material costs and increasing incremental revenue over time.
Automated Troubleshooting Using Expert Technicians
Speed and quality. You can have it all. Our senior technicians have made troubleshooting repairs as easy as following a recipe by capturing their own valuable knowledge and integrating it with Internet of Things (IoT) technology. iQor’s troubleshooting system is able to scan a unit and automatically match the repair solution based on the failure code. The system then walks the technician through the repair process in real-time, adjusting its steps based on unresolved errors until the unit is completely repaired.
Thanks to the bottling up of this knowledge, products can get back to the hands of customers more quickly (reduced cycle time) and are certified to perform better than new. In fact, one of our major video broadband clients has seen its repeat returns rate — the number of units returned multiple times — decrease to 0.46% from 4.3% and service quality average 77% better than the industry standard.
Solving Hidden Issues at (Smart) Home
We don’t sweep issues under the rug at our Smart Home Simulation Room --- we create them. We set up a model living room at our Memphis facility to study connectivity, from systemic issues to the long list of possible frustrations surveyed by customers. This includes setup, WiFi connectivity, Internet bandwidth, signal strength, and interoperability, or the inability for specific devices to interact and exchange information.
In a recent demonstration, iQor’s lab showed how the physical layout and vertical positioning of Wi-Fi and other IoT components could increase the signal strength to a smart-TV in another room by as much as 30 percent—eliminating poor 4K streaming performance. This use case exemplifies how it can sometimes be the operating environment, rather than the various hardware devices themselves, that are hindering optimal connectivity. Even the most tech-savvy customer will benefit from little tricks like this, thus avoiding the whole return process altogether and saving you the costs associated with it.
Extending the life of your products is more than just repair. You have to understand what your products mean to your customers and implement changes that keep them, and your profit margins, happy. The right combination of quality products and experienced teams can do just that, and so much more.
Leverage iQor's world-class experience to improve performance and extend the life cycle of your product portfolio. Contact us today.
