Helping Seagate Innovate
Driving Seagate’s Data Rescue Product Innovation
As a global leader in data storage solution, Seagate has sold billions of hard drives and has hundreds of millions of devices actively under warranty at any given time. The company constantly seeks innovations that can drive revenue and customer experience and keep them at the forefront of the storage and data industry. Learn how After, Inc.’s Warranty Analytics and Risk Management frameworks support ed Seagate’s development and rollout of a data rescue service.
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$10.4billion annual revenue
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40,000employees worldwide
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100’sof millions of drives under active warranty
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Business Challenge
As General Manager of Seagate’s Data Recovery business, Paul Steele is uniquely attuned to the fact that Seagate’s customers ultimately don’t care about their devices; they care about what’s on their devices. With 25% of customer support calls pertaining to lost data, and many customers mistakenly assuming that data recovery services are covered by their break/fix warranties — Steele hypothesized that a well–priced data recovery service contract would be a revenue and customer happiness bullseye.
Steele’s big hurdle was cost — with an average cost of $3,000 to recover lost hard drive data, the contract would need to be priced higher than the device itself — making it a dead proposition for the consumer. Steele envisioned using insurance underwriting techniques to spread the risk across the purchasing pool and drive the cost per customer down to a reasonable level.
Steele had pitched this concept internally and externally for over two years, hearing again and again that no underwriter would take the business because of a lack of historical data. He coincidentally met the warranty analytics team from After while they were working with Seagate on a separate project. They believed Steele’s underwriting idea was viable— and pulled together a small team of analysts to help Steele explore the possibilities.
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Solution
1. Build robust predictive models to forecast failure rates, costs and contract pricing.
Armed with reams of raw data including drive failure rates, repair costs and repair success rates, the analysts at After began to develop a living model to forecast risk, costs, and potential contract pricing.
2. Secure an underwriting partner and bring the contracts to reality.
Encouraged by the data, After led a successful RFP process to identify an underwriter as a launch partner, then managed the underwriter as well as the legal and administrative process to make the proposed contracts a reality.
3. Launch a go-to-market strategy focused on Seagate’s existing registered customer database to validate and baseline the business.
Next was the go-to-market strategy. After and Steele decided to launch first to Seagate’s existing database of registered customers to help iron out any program bugs and internally baseline the business before taking the program to scale through big box channel partners.
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Results
Profitable from day one.
The direct-to-customer after market program has been profitable since day one, with costs and risk predicted almost to the penny.
Scaled to worldwide channel partners.
Based on the launch program’s success, Seagate was able to expand to channel partners within 8 months of initial program launch – well ahead of target. Data Rescue is now live with Amazon.com, Staples, and Costco, and is quickly becoming a core pillar of the Seagate warranty and overall services business.
Drove lower prices and higher profits with aggressive quarter-over-quarter cost reductions.
Within 14 months Steele and After had eliminated the underwriters and pulled the program 100% in-house, enabling them to further reduce costs and position the program for aggressive scaling.