No excuses: Warranty and quality issues avoidable

Ensuring good product quality continues to be a defining issue for many companies these days. Far from being a minor detail in a company's overall strategy for success, it has now taken center stage as the key player in a company's market dominance.

Even with good practices in place, many large global manufacturers still ship products that eventually require recall. Some blame quality issues on their suppliers, while others are simply so eager to get their products out the door that they overlook product quality tracking procedures altogether. Regardless of how the degradation in quality occurs, its affect is undeniable – a decline in customer confidence, tarnished reputation for the brand owner and a negative impact on the brand owner's bottom line.

In this new age of consumer empowerment and social networking, consumers have access to information faster than ever before, and that information spreads via the Internet at an astronomical speed. When a problem occurs in a product, the result may be an angry blog or even a bad product review or testimonial. Either way, once the information is on the Internet, it is readily accessible and, with a shelf-life that's virtually infinite. Because the flood of information can bring inquiries from the media, customers and prospective customers, brand owners no longer have the opportunity to delay releasing recall information or details regarding a potential problem to the public. Brand owners are also frequently put in a position of having to respond to an issue before they have a well thought out plan in place.

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