12-Week Roadmap to Deliver a Data-Driven Warranty/Care Management (Part 1 of 3)
In today's complex service management landscape, measuring performance can be daunting. With the mix of systems, warrantable and non-warrantable issues, and various stakeholders (customers, suppliers, builders), establishing a reliable and data-driven warranty and care management function is crucial.Why Using Data to Measure Customer Service Management is Crucial
Using data to measure service management is key for many reasons. Data-driven insights give homebuilders an objective basis for making decisions. This helps you spot patterns and trends they might miss otherwise. With this information, your can manage service issues proactively, improving quality and customer satisfaction.Efficient warranty management boosts referrals since happy customers are more likely to recommend your homebuilder (and less likely to block homebuyers!), lowering your overall cost of sales. By tracking and analyzing key metrics, builders can refine processes, increase accountability, and drive continuous improvement.Data changes service management from reactive to strategic, ensuring long-term success, higher customer loyalty, and lower operational costs.Here we introduce a 12-week roadmap to help you achieve this goal. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, where we will dive deeper into customer and financial metrics.Current State
Effective warranty/care management is a leading indicator of quality and referrals. However, tracking and analyzing service performance is challenging due to the diversity of systems and stakeholders involved. To tackle this, you need to focus on three primary metric categories:- Service Metrics: Volume, speed, team efficiency
- Customer Metrics: NPS, pulse surveys, customer touchpoints
- Financial Metrics: Department costs, claim costs, supplier costs
Getting Started
Week 0: Laying the Foundation
Begin by collecting the minimum data points: date, home, description, status, and ticket owner. With this data, you can start building your first dashboard. Plan to hold weekly review meetings, starting with Week 0 as your baseline.Initial Metrics to Track
- Key Language:
- Service Requests: Intiated by the homeowner; need for information; concern or reporting a defect.
- Service Order: Response to solve a service request; usualy internal or for a supplier to do something.
- Baseline your scale:
- Number of Homes under warranty: How many homes are under warranty (HuW); track number of new homes under warranty (+); number of homes that are now out of warranty (-) and Net Homes under warranty. Ie: We started the week with 285 homes under warranty, we added 10 new homes under warranty, 15 are out of warranty for net of 280 homes under warranty.
- Baseline your intake:
- Number of New Service Requests: Track new service requests, present the data per home under warranty. Ie: We had 40 new service requests for 280 homes under warranty; 0.133 Service Requests per HuW
- Baseline your exits:
- Number of Closed Service Requests: Count the number of closed service orders. ie: We closed 65 Service Requsts & we closed 35 Service orders this week.
- Number of Open Service Requests: The total number of open service requestrs. ie: we had 100 open service requests, we added 40 new; closed 35 for net 105 open service requests.
- Baseline your responsiveness:
- Average Age of Open Service Requests: Calculate the average age of open service Requests.
- Customers care about the lagging issues the most; this metric considers that many of your requests are solved in 0 days; so we don’t want those to skew the results, we want to focus on the cases that are lagging. So only count new/open cases at the end of the week and how old are the cases.
Week-by-Week Breakdown
Week 0: Baseline Metrics- Agenda: Focus on basic data collection and setting the stage for future analysis, how service management is connected to revenue, and why it needs to be measured.
- Data Review: Compare Week 1 data with the Week 0 baseline.
- Agenda: Understand initial data and set expectations. Tune your data collection.
- Trend Analysis: Review three weeks of data to identify trends.
- Variability Discussion: Address data variability and start the conversation on improving consistency.
- Agenda: Discuss initial trends and potential causes.
- Detailed Analysis: Break down data by project (ie: development, construction manager), type (ie: leak, paint, door), and warrantable vs. non-warrantable requests.
- Trend Refinement: Refine trend analysis with additional data points.
- Agenda: Conduct a retrospective on the first month’s data, discussing what to start, stop, and continue.
Midpoint Review and Adjustments
Week 5: Metric Improvement Focus- Targeted Metrics: Decide on specific metrics to focus on for improvement.
- Agenda: Develop strategies for targeted metric improvement.
- Customer Data Integration: Introduce customer satisfaction metrics like pulse surveys and number of customer touchpoints (customer effort like emails, phone calls, onsite meetings with team / suppliers).
- Agenda: Expand reporting to include both service and customer metrics.
Sustained Efforts and Financial Integration
Weeks 7--9: Standardization and Continuous Improvement- Standard Agenda: Maintain a consistent meeting agenda focusing on continuous improvement.
- Start-Stop-Continue: Regularly review and adjust strategies.
- Cost Analysis: Begin reporting on financial metrics, including costs by department, claims, and suppliers, if you can’t get hard cost dollars; headcount metics will work.
- Agenda: Integrate financial data into the service and customer metrics review.
Conclusion and Reporting
Weeks 11-12: Final Adjustments and Comprehensive Reporting- Standing Agenda: Continue with the established agenda, incorporating all three metric categories.
- Comprehensive Report: Prepare a detailed report covering the 12-week data, trends, and improvements.
Next Steps
As you conclude the 12-week process, summarize key takeaways and actionable insights. Outline the next steps for maintaining and further improving your data-driven warranty/care management function.Get Started!
Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, where we will break down customer and financial metrics. Share your experiences and insights with us to help others in their journey toward effective service management.Our mission is to simplify the homeowners & home builders customer experience. Let Iris do the work.
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