Challenges for a company that sells physical products
The kinds of products a company sells truly determines the types of resources a company needs in order to properly deliver and support clients when the product has actually been bought. Selling a car for example, comes with totally different requirements than selling a website service, even though the client can be the exact same kind of person. So, if an organization sells physical products, it will definitely go through different challenges as opposed to an organization that sells services. Here are some of the challenges experienced by companies that sell physical products.
A Service and Logistics Department Is Needed
When an organization sells physical products, one important question that comes to mind is how are you going to help a customer with a faulty product? When you sell a physical product you will need to have some logistical process set up and some dedicated service engineer that would, either go on site to help the customer, or, actually arrange to get the faulty product transported back to the company for servicing. An actual service department is also essential for actually investigating faulty products and correcting the issues. So again, having these two things is important if your organization sells physical products.
Added Costs Servicing Physical Products
The process of servicing physical products is that you might need to replace physical parts within the product, or the product all together in order to correct the fault. It might be the case that organization in question does not have the spare part or product in its inventory at the time of the issue. So, the part needs to be ordered from a supplier, which might take more time to fix. Depending on what kind of service agreement the customer has signed with the organization, it could also mean that the organization would have to absorb some penalty costs due to extended repair delays.
Acceptance Testing Both at Factory and at Customer Side
When a physical product is sold, it is likely that a product needs testing, both at the factory and at the customer. This is necessary to verify whether the product is leaving the factory at an acceptable working state and, that product is still in an acceptable working state when it is installed at the customer.
So in conclusion, selling physical products require an actual service department and logistics department to fix and ship replacement products or parts, there are added costs when servicing physical products and there needs to be an acceptance test both at the factory and at the customer side.
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