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Home Depot Life Cycle

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The decisions made by operations managers are generally shaped by where the product is with respect to its life cyle. In other words, firms always take a 'life-cycle' approach when it comes to managing their products. Yet, many of them put this approach aside when it comes to managing their customers . Once the product is sold, the returns are generally seen as a 'secondary issue' to be taken care of and its effect on the potential revenue stream is mostly ignored. According to a recent report published,1 90 per cent of unhappy customers never buy again from a firm that has given them poor service and that it costs businesses between 3 and 10 times less to keep an existing customer than finding new ones. A major part of the customer service, especially in a retailing …show more content…

In the same year, Home Depot and Lowe's net revenues were
$66.2 billion and $47.2 billion, respectively, which means Home Depot's returns were approximately $5.3 billion and Lowe's were around $3.8 billion. Assuming 20 per cent of these returns and/or exchanges were not managed effectively in one way or another, that is $1.8 billion in merchandise. If half of these customers choose to stay away permanently (not the 90 per cent mentioned previously), that still means close to a billion in potential lost sales each year indefinitely, so an initial sales is not the end of a revenue management process.
A recent poll found that 91 per cent of consumers interviewed considered return policies and processes as important to their decision about where to make a purchase. Based on all these statistics, why do firms not use the most liberal return policies they can to maximize their customers' experience and avoid such losses? Part of it is due to customer abuse and fraudulent returns, which according to the same NRF report is about only 8 per cent of the total returns. This is obviously more of a problem for brick and mortar retailers than it is for

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