Case Study: National-scale warranty management

In today’s automotive landscape, recalls are no longer isolated service events, they are enterprise-wide stress tests that challenge an OEM’s operational agility, regulatory preparedness, and brand credibility. As vehicles age and ownership changes hands, the complexity of managing recalls—particularly those involving warranty reimbursements—intensifies. Owners may have already self-remediated, dealer networks must be synchronized, and call centers are inundated with a dual surge of repair inquiries and reimbursement claims.

In this high-pressure environment, effective warranty management becomes a strategic differentiator. It requires more than just answering phones or processing forms—it demands a coordinated ecosystem of customer engagement, secure documentation workflows, fraud mitigation, and scalable resourcing. The goal: to deliver a seamless experience for affected consumers while preserving service levels for the broader customer base.

When a global automaker initiated a voluntary recall affecting over 1.3 million vehicles, Sedgwick Brand Protection delivered a purpose-built warranty management solution that balanced speed, accuracy, and customer empathy, without compromising day-to-day operations.

Challenge

The recall’s scope spanned multiple models and production years, creating two concurrent operational pressures:

• A surge in inbound volume: Owners flooded the contact center with requests for both repair appointments and reimbursement for prior out-of-pocket repairs. The volume far exceeded the automaker’s existing call center capacity.
• Dealer network strain: Dealers faced elevated demand for parts coordination and repair scheduling, requiring real-time alignment with customer service operations.

Compounding the challenge was the need for a robust, scalable mechanism to collect, validate, and adjudicate thousands of warranty claims—while preventing fraud, eliminating duplicates, and ensuring regulatory compliance. Without intervention, the automaker risked degraded service levels, increased customer frustration, and reputational damage.

Solution

Sedgwick Brand Protection deployed a comprehensive warranty management program designed to absorb the surge, protect the brand, and streamline the customer journey. The solution was built on four strategic pillars:

Scalable specialist resourcing: 

• Rapidly expanded an automotive-specialist call center to isolate recall traffic from core customer service lines.  
• Deployed trained agents able to triage inquiries, guide repair scheduling, and manage reimbursement workflows to reduce handoffs and resolve issues on first contact.  

Customer-centric digital intake:

• Built a dedicated customer web portal integrated with Sedgwick’s recall and warranty application to capture claims and uploads in a secure, structured format.  
• Standardized document types and submission steps to reduce customer friction and minimize incomplete claims.  

Automated validation and fraud mitigation:

• Leveraged cross-resource processing and the recall application to perform quality inspections, de-duplicate submissions, and flag anomalies for manual review.  
• Applied rule-based validation to accelerate approvals for clear-cut reimbursements and route complex cases for adjudication.  

Operational separation to protect service levels:

• Operated the recall program as a dedicated call center stream to avoid disruption to the routine customer service operations, preserving brand experience for non-affected customers.

Results

With Sedgwick Brand Protection’s call center support, the global automotive manufacturer was able to handle 30× the typical inbound call volume while maintaining a 90% Average Service Level, preserving operational stability across the broader contact center and ensuring routine customer service was not degraded during the recall.

Over a 60‑day period Sedgwick received, reviewed and processed more than 5,000 warranty claims using a hybrid model of automated intake and targeted manual review, accelerating decisioning and dramatically reducing backlog.

Structured intake and validation processes significantly reduced exposure to duplicate and fraudulent claims, protecting warranty spend and preserving brand integrity while allowing teams to focus on legitimate reimbursements and complex exceptions.

Shorter average call times, clearer submission pathways and faster reimbursement decisions preserved trust among affected owners and minimized disruption for the dealer network, supporting long‑term customer loyalty.

Key takeaways

• Segment recall traffic: Create a separate recall-focused contact stream to shield routine customer service and preserve overall experience.  
• Design digital-first intake: A secure, structured web portal standardizes documents, reduces friction, and accelerates adjudication.  
• Combine automation with specialist review: Rule-based validation handles volume while expert reviewers resolve exceptions and complex reimbursements.  
• Plan for fraud and duplication: Early de-duplication and anomaly detection protect warranty budgets and speed legitimate claim resolution.  
• Treat recalls as strategic events: Recalls must be managed as integrated programs that balance regulatory compliance, logistics, claims adjudication, and customer retention to sustain long-term brand equity.

About Sedgwick Brand Protection

Brand and reputation are the most valuable and vulnerable assets a business has. Brands embody everything a business does, and its customers expect. 

Nothing says more about a company’s commitment to its customers than its efforts to uphold promises of safety, quality, and service. That’s why companies are often remembered more for how they handle an in-market challenge than for the problem itself. We know what it takes to manage recalls in a way that upholds your commitments to customers, supply chain partners, and regulators. 

Trusted by the world’s leading brands and businesses, Sedgwick Brand Protection works in partnership to manage the risks and minimize the impacts of in-market business and product crises. Since 1995, we have managed more than 7,000 of the most sensitive and time-critical product recall and remediation programs, spanning 150+ countries and 50+ languages. 

To discover more about our product recall and incident response solutions, visit: https://www.sedgwick.com/product-recall

1.3MM

affected units

30x

uplift in call volume

90%

SLA achieved

5,000

warranty claims processed in 60 days