It's pretty simple to do what Western Digital has always done with hard drives. You take a credit card number. If they haven't received the defective unit back within 30 days the card gets charged for the price of the unit.
Companies who care about their customers implement customer-centric policies and procedures. A procedure that says "we understand how important the use of our product is to you, so we're getting you a replacement as soon as possible" looks like this:
Customer contacts support and opens a ticket and provides a credit card number
Customer service creates a Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) associated with the ticket and all subsequent electronic records in the process
This triggers an outbound and inbound delivery to be created
The outbound delivery request triggers pick, pack, ship notification at the warehouse
The replacement unit is goods issued in the system as the package leaves the facility
In the meantime, the inbound delivery is waiting for a goods receipt to occur at the warehouse when the defective unit arrives
If the RMA number is scanned in the warehouse within 30 days from issuing the RMA and creating the inbound delivery - then the process is complete and documents are closed
If the RMA number is NOT scanned within 30 days - on the 31st day the credit card is charged and the documents are closed.
This is an industry best practice for providing a customer centric returns and warranty replacement process. Furthermore, a more mature business process would include end to end process monitoring. Someone at the company would be looking at the timestamps of all the electronic records tied to the RMA number and generated throughout the process for all of the returns in aggregate to identify where the process could be improved. Even more mature would be using machine learning to crunch all that data and surface the analysis to a data scientist in an interactive web based dashboard.
It helps reduce cost because the customer service rep requires labor to process the communications with the customer. The warehouse worker requires labor to pick, pack, and ship the unit as well as to process the returned defective equipment. It also takes accountants to process the journal entries, reconcile at month end, and close the books. At any step, something could go wrong in the system. Bad master data blocks a posting or incorrectly allocates a cost requiring more labor to research and resolve the issue further maximizing the cost of a situation that should have never happened in the first place if the software lifecycle had been managed properly using best practices for software dev/ops.
Finally, it helps to avoid damaging a relationship with a long time customer. The cost of acquiring that customer back is the ultimate price to pay throughout the whole unfortunate event. In my case, they are not just losing me and one device but also losing my wife and two kids who also have Fitbits. That's four devices (plus all future upgrades) on the way out the door. The cost and damage grows exponentially when that defecting customer tells everyone they can about the horrible experience and the cancer spreads stopping future potential customers from becoming actual customers.
A company the size of Fitbit/Google has the time, money, and resources to address best practices such as these. Unfortunately, this is one of many industry best practices not being followed by Fitbit/Google. The software development, quality assurance, and deployment practices are lacking as well but that is a whole other post.
My larger concern with anything attached to Google is they are not customer centric. They are involved in so many things that inevitably, something no longer gets the right amount of attention (capital investment) . Google builds or acquires things and initially has grand plans. Then something happens and its no longer the "It" thing getting the attention and it gets back-burnered or even dropped completely. Like a child who gets bored with a toy and tosses it aside for the next shiny toy. For this reason, I'm always always afraid to invest in anything in Googles ecosystem. I knew it was a bad deal for me when Fitbit was acquired by Google. Nothing I can do but migrate away....
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