subject: Keeping Warranties Intact With Security Labels [print this page] As a manufacturer of electronic devices, product returns are part and parcel of our business. Sometimes things just break or don't work the way they're supposed to. It doesn't matter how hard we work to ensure that our products are built to the highest quality - and we do; a good eighty percent of the process is manual rather than automated - but sometimes electronics just go wrong or don't work at all.
The problem my company experienced was that, considering that our products are in the higher-end of our chosen market, we would get a fair number of products returned simply because the customers had either attempted repairs themselves or they would simply realise that they couldn't really afford it and thus would tamper with it and return it for a refund since 'it doesn't work'. We knew this was happening, we could see that there had been tampering, but without being able to prove it, we were stuck providing refunds on these tampered products, until we came across tamper-evident security labels.
One of my employees saw security labels of this kind on his child's video games console, and he immediately saw the applications of it in our products. The label in question was placed on the joins of the casing and would separate if the casing was opened, ensuring that unauthorised attempts at repairs could not be attempted without invalidating the warranty, which is exactly what we were looking for with our products.
Applying security labels of this kind to our products offered an immediate benefit of keeping the warranty intact. Although the problem of people returning devices after deliberately tampering with them existed, there was also the issue of the products genuinely failing and the customer trying to save time with some home repairs - this often compounded the problem and made the repair process much more difficult.
Fortunately, applying these labels to our products has all but eliminated these issues for us. Now if one of our products fails, it's easy for us to repair them without too much difficulty, and the issue of deliberate tampering for refunds is all but gone.
Available for less than you might be expecting, ordering a range of security labels customised to our requirements has been an excellent source of savings for our business. Without worrying about how many of our products are genuine returns, it's allowed us the time to work on fixing the underlying issues which were causing the returns in the first place and now we're releasing a much better product as well as making a much better profit.
