For the past 50 years, a leading supplier of technology products, solutions and services has steadily grown to become one of top electronic retail powerhouses in North America. The company recently expanded beyond retail sales to offer product repair services. They became victims of their own success as their large repair facility quickly approached maximum capacity. Increasing the efficiency of their current facility and/or building another multi-million facility was neither feasible nor affordable.

Needing to know how long they could push average repair times before negatively impacting customer satisfaction, the organization enlisted the help of CFI Group. By tying customer satisfaction survey data to individual service tickets, CFI Group calculated that an average repair took 10 days, but there was no satisfaction reward for items returned earlier than the companies’ standard 14 day estimate. In contrast, customers expressed a sharp downturn in satisfaction every day beyond 14 days.

Digging deeper into the data, CFI Group noticed that one-third of respondents received a basic courtesy call from their local store while their items were out for repair. In addition, the data showed that this simple phone call reassured customers so much that they would tolerate up to an 18-day average turnaround time, four days longer than initially quoted.

Based on these findings, CFI Group recommended the following two-fold changes to help address the company’s overcapacity issue:

• Take advantage of the existing four-day grace period in customer satisfaction by holding inventory longer at the facility, increasing the average repair service time from 10 days to 14 days
• Instill courtesy calls as a new corporate-wide best practice for repairs expecting to be returned longer than 14 days

By implementing these changes, the company achieved a rare feat for the retail industry—they were able to increase customer satisfaction while actually slowing down the service they delivered. With CFI Group’s guidance, the company discovered a new way to meet future market demand, alleviate their capacity concerns, and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction with little or no added investment.