Post-sale warranty claims, return authorizations, and vendor chargebacks are falling through the cracks because neither Sales nor Operations wants to own the seat. How do we place and staff an unglamorous seat that both departments reject?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a necessary operational function has no clear owner, it drifts between departments until client frustration or cash leakage forces an emergency response. In many scaling businesses, warranty processing and return merchandise authorizations (RMA) sit in an organizational no-man's-land. Sales views warranty handling as an administrative distraction that damages client relationships, while Operations views returns as an annoying disruption to standard production or fulfillment workflows.

In EOS, you cannot leave a box unassigned or assign multiple seats accountability for the same outcome. To resolve this, use the IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) process with your leadership team.

First, analyze the actual workflow of the function. Post-sale warranty claims involve receiving physical goods, technical inspection, inventory restocking or scrap disposition, and accounting reconciliation for vendor chargebacks. By structural nature, these are operational and financial execution tasks, not revenue-generation activities. Therefore, the Warranty and RMA seat must sit squarely inside Operations or Finance on the Accountability Chart, never floating between them.

Second, define five clear roles for the seat. For example:
- Processing warranty and return requests within 24 hours
- Inspecting returned inventory and determining warranty validity
- Executing vendor chargebacks to recover product costs
- Maintaining RMA turnaround time metrics
- Identifying root-cause quality failures and feeding data back to production

Once the seat is defined and anchored under Operations, address the staffing. If the current volume does not justify a dedicated full-time hire, assign the seat to an existing operational team member who has the capacity, and update their personal scorecard to measure turnaround time and recovered chargebacks. When unglamorous seats have measurable scorecards, accountability replaces avoidance.