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Focuses on a group of unsatisfied carpet owners. Examines the roles of the carpet warranty and the post‐purchase service received during the complaint process in terms of their effects on customers′ satisfaction with complaint resolution. Presents some suggestions for customer service policies, complaint handling procedures, and warranty fulfilment service.

This case study aims to develop and empirically test a general framework for the implementation and evaluation of a warranty policy (i.e. implementation, support structure, and evaluation stages) within the context of a high‐tech global firm.

The sample consisted of the employees of an anonymous US‐based global high tech firm.

The findings for the implementation stage report that the cost and profit centers should have their costs allocated on the basis of activity. For the support structure, there is a negative response to outsourcing as an option for implementing the warranty policy. For the evaluation, findings report that US firms should reevaluate their pricing, quality, and warranty strategy for domestic and international markets.

This case study can be expanded by examining how companies balance the cost/quality/warranty ability of the product, the techniques used to allocate warranty costs, and to evaluate multiple companies/industries, perhaps with a longitudinal focus.

Findings report that the budgeted costs should be allocated depending on the type of incident. The majority of outsourcing opponents consisted of service personnel while those in favor were from product marketing departments. Also, the US firms need to provide written warranty information to their customers.

The proposed framework will satisfy a current, critical need to provide guidelines for the steps needed to implement and evaluate a warranty policy within a context of a high tech global company. Additionally, this case research study's key contribution lies in its attempt to address warranty management processes within a multitude of a firm's departments. Furthermore, the anonymous high tech company used in this study was chosen as a sample because the company offered a wide range of products, warranties, and service options. The company also utilized a vast reseller base to sell and service its products. This method offered the potential to gain better insight with regards to the role of resellers in a warranty program. It also marketed products and services to six specific industries: financial, retail, transportation, manufacturing, communications, and the public. This broad industrial perspective gave the study added cross‐industries' insight in reference to implementation and evaluation of a good warranty policy since the anonymous high tech company considers these industries to be sustainable industries in the USA and abroad.

We investigate the extended service strategy choices of competing manufacturers and examine their impact on the retail platform.

We construct a supply chain model with a retail platform as the leader and manufacturers as the followers. Manufacturers face differential consumer preferences on the same agency retail platform, and they can sell a bundled extended service product and sell a separate product without any extended service.

The sale of extended warranty services on the retail platform leads to lower pricing of the manufacturers' products and changes in the product market structure in response to differences in consumer preferences. The retailing platform tends to provide an extended warranty conditionally. The sale of extended warranty services on a retail platform would be detrimental to the interests of the manufacturer who sells products with extended warranty services and in favor of the manufacturer who sells products without them.

The equilibrium results of the retail platform’s non-sales and sales of extended warranty services for the no-extended warranty product under the same commission rate and differential commission rate models are discussed, and the product structure of the market is investigated, respectively.

Manufacturers and remanufacturers strive to maximize supply chain effectiveness by eliminating wastes in all their forms. This line of research extends the effectiveness during the products' working lives. Fraud in the warranty service chain (WSC) is one such source of waste that leads to revenue losses in the short term but when left unchecked leads to far worse results in the long term. Warranty frauds in the new product industry have received significant attention in recent literature. Addressing fraud issues in the remanufacturing industry have not been a high priority. Previous studies considered the primary parties in the WSC as possible sources of fraud. However, several unique opportunities exist for the secondary parties when it comes to fraud. This chapter considers fraud originating from one of the secondary parties of the WSC, namely the warranty administrator. The chapter models this fraud scenario using discrete event simulation and explores a possible fraud mitigation scenario.

The product warranty has become an increasingly important factor contributing to the consumer's assessment of overall product value in recent years and, in consequence, can nowadays have a significant effect on demand levels for a particular product make or brand. The warranty is in effect an “added value” component by which the manufacturer commits himself to a given level of responsibility (usually over a specific time period) for the performance of the product he sells.

Warranty service plays a critical role in sustainability and service continuity and influences customer satisfaction. Considering the role of social networks in customer feedback channels, one of the essential sources to examine the reflection of a product/service is social media mining. This paper aims to identify the frequent product failures through social network mining. Focusing on social media data as a comprehensive and online source to detect warranty issues reveals opportunities for improvement, such as user problems and necessities. This model will detect the causes of defects and prioritize improving components in a product-service system based on FMEA results.

Ontology-based methods, text mining and sentiment analysis with machine learning methods are performed on social media data to investigate product defects, symptoms and the relationship between warranty plans and customer behaviour. Also, the authors have incorporated multi-source data collection to cover all the possibilities. Then the authors promote a decision support system to help the decision-makers using the FMEA process have a more comprehensive insight through customer feedback. Finally, to validate the accuracy and reliability of the results, the authors used the operational data of a LENOVO laptop from a warranty service centre and classifier performance metrics to compare the authors’ results.

This study confirms the validity of social media data in detecting customer sentiments and discovering the most defective components and failures of the products/services. In other words, the informative threads are derived through a data preparation process and then are based on analyzing the different features of a failure (issues, symptoms, causes, components, solutions). Using social media data helps gain more accurate online information due to the limitation of warranty periods. In other words, using social media data broadens the scope of data gathering and lets in all feedback from different sources to recognize improvement opportunities.

This work contributes a DSS model using multi-channel social media mining through supervised machine learning for warranty-service improvement based on defect-related discovery to unravel the potential aspects of social networks analysis to predict the most vulnerable components of a product and the main causes of failures that lead to the inputs for the FMEA process and then, a cost optimization. The authors have used social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LENOVO Forums, GitHub, Quora and XDA-Developers to gather data about the LENOVO laptop failures as a case study.

The purpose of this paper is to address what a sound warranty policy entails by identifying the key variables involved in the development of a warranty program.

The sample population was composed of employees in the US division involved with high‐tech product warranties. A survey questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants.

The paper finds that the formality of the warranty policy should depend on its complexity. Differences exist between types of warranty based on the product knowledge of the buyer. Although a standardized warranty is easy to administer, as the product line diversifies, it becomes more challenging to standardize.

This study can be expanded by examining how companies balance the cost/quality/warranty ability of the product, the techniques used to allocate warranty costs, and to evaluate multiple companies/industries, perhaps with a longitudinal focus.

The formality can be used to communicate the product warranty throughout the organization. Each department has a responsibility to the customer, so team members from service, product development, and marketing should plan and develop the warranty. A standardized warranty can send a clearer message to a customer about a firm's products. Simplifying front and back‐end processing and streamlining support structures can reduce costs.

In this paper, the identified key variable is brought out in warranty management framework. The development of this framework will satisfy a current, critical need to provide guidelines with all the steps needed to develop a warranty policy.

This paper aims to present various three-level service contracts among the following three participants: a manufacturer, an agent and a customer. The interaction between the aforementioned participants will be modeled using the game theory approach. Under non-cooperative and cooperative games, the optimal sale price, warranty period and warranty price for the manufacturer and the optimal maintenance cost (repair cost) and marketing expenditure for the agent are obtained by maximizing their profits. The satisfaction of the customer is also maximized by being able to choose one of the suggested options from the manufacturer and the agent, based on the risk parameter.

Three-echelon supply chains with marketing and warranty services are studied. Game-theoretic approaches (non-cooperative and cooperative) are presented. The non-cooperative approaches are static (NE) and dynamic (Stakelberg) models. The cooperative approach is related to bargaining models (Nash bargaining games). The authors develop a sensitivity analysis of some parameters and their effect.

Based on the mentioned drawbacks (i.e. lack of a model containing warranty, marketing and pricing), despite their importance, a developed model is proposed in this research to cover one of the research gaps. In addition, main contributions of this paper that differentiate it from the existing papers are regarding inventory, lost sale and lost goodwill, which are significant in the comparison environment. Another advantage of this study is related to the solution approach, the game theory. Twofold of the games theoretical, i.e. cooperative (in three forms) and non-cooperative are considered, because of their importance. Three types of non-cooperative games are presented as follows: Nash equilibrium – each echelon decides respectively and simultaneously; manufacturer-Stackelberg – the manufacturer has more power than the agent and the agent has more power than the customer; and customer-Stackelberg – customer is leader of the agent and the agent is the leader of manufacturer. The involved cooperative game in this paper is the bargaining problem that the participants can determine how to share the additional profits.

In this paper, various three-level service contracts will be presented among the following three participants: a manufacturer, an agent and a customer. The interaction between the aforementioned participants will be modeled using the game theory approach. Under non-cooperative and cooperative games, the optimal sale price, warranty period and warranty price for the manufacturer and the optimal maintenance cost (repair cost) and marketing expenditure for the agent are obtained by maximizing their profits. The satisfaction of the customer is also maximized by being able to choose one of the suggested options from the manufacturer and the agent, based on the risk parameter. Several numerical examples are used to illustrate the models presented in this paper. Finally, the authors develop a sensitivity analysis of some parameters and their effects on the objective functions.

The purpose of this paper is to build a warranty cost model for consumer electronics with short lifecycle and frequently upgraded process in generations. Meanwhile, a new warranty service method of replacing the failed old generation (OG) products by new generation (NG) products is proposed to cease the service capability for the OG products from manufacturers’ viewpoint.

A model is built to find an optimal time to switch to the new warranty service method to minimize the warranty cost of the OG products. The inventory cost of spare parts of OG products for warranty, repair cost and manufacturing cost of NG products are taken into account. Meanwhile, a mixed strategy is studied by providing options to customers for replacing their failed OG products with NG products by paying a discounted price of the OG products. Moreover, numerical experiments are conducted to test the effects of different parameters on the optimal solutions.

Solutions to the proposed model are discussed with analytic method and it is proved that the optimal solution exists in the considered situations. The mixed strategy considering the willingness of customers can result in the reduction of the warranty cost.

This paper analyzes the situation that more than one generations of products are in the marketplace simultaneously. Furthermore, this work makes a useful contribution for manufacturers to decrease their warranty cost by changing the service method, and provides the optimal warranty strategy for manufacturers considering the willingness of customers.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to analyse the existing work of warranty risk management (WaRM); second, to develop a generic WaRM framework; and third, to design a generic taxonomy for warranty hazards from a warranty chain perspective.

To understand the top warranty hazards, the authors designed a questionnaire, received 40 responses from the warranty decision makers (WDM) in the automotive industry in the UK and then analysed the responses.

The assembly process capability at suppliers is the top contributor to warranty incidents from the suppliers’ and original equipment manufacturers’ (OEMs’) viewpoints. The human error at different stages of the product lifecycle contributes to the occurrence of warranty incidents. The collaboration among parties, particularly, the accessibility to warranty-related data between parties (i.e. suppliers, OEM and dealers), is limited. Customers’ fraud contributes more to warranty costs than warranty services providers’ fraud. The top contributors to customer dissatisfaction relating to warranty are the warranty service time and service quality.

The questionnaires were used to collect data in the UK, which implies the research outcomes of this paper may only reflect the UK area.

The WaRM framework and taxonomy proposed in this paper provide WDM with a holistic view to identifying the top contributors to warranty incidents. With them, the decision makers will be able to allocate the required fund and efforts more effectively.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing the first work of systematically analysing the top contributors to warranty incidents and costs and by providing a WaRM framework.