Quality Control Improvements

Long ago someone explained to me the two types of quality control: sufficient control and forced-failure control. Sufficient control goes like this: can we open and close this car’s door 100,000 times before it breaks? If yes, we have sufficient quality. Forced-failure control goes like this: open and close the car door until it breaks. Re-engineer the broken part to be stronger. Repeat. Sufficient control means things stay okay, forced-failure control means they get better every year.

By any standards of sufficient quality control, LensRentals is awesome. We have a 99.8% customer satisfaction rate. So far in 2008, we’ve shipped 13,000 items with 79 items “not okay” when the customer received them, so 99.5% of our customers got exactly what they asked for working perfectly. That would be sufficient quality control by anyone’s standards, especially when you consider that 4.5% of the brand new lenses we receive from the big two manufacturers are broken. So, if you bought a new lens from the manufacturer, there’s a ten times higher chance it would be broken than if you rented it from us.

That said, we hold ourselves to a higher standard: anything other than perfect leaves room for improvement. So, we’ve looked carefully at those 79 items and what we can do to make our customer service stronger. We also looked at customer comments from other rental businesses, to see what customers did and didn’t like elsewhere and how we could improve your experience at LensRentals. We’ve learned some things and are implementing some major changes to make ourselves even better.

1. A number of customers have moved to LensRentals because the equipment they received at other rental houses was old or heavily used. Despite the fact that we stock newer equipment than any other rental house, we’ve seen in analyzing the “failed lens” rate that age is still a major factor. So, we’ve tightened our age limits: all of our lenses will be sold at 2 years of age or 40 rental weeks, whichever comes first. Camera bodies will be sold at 1 year of age or 30 weeks of rental. We’re proud of how new we keep our fleet— especially considering many rental houses buy mostly used equipment for theirs— and as soon as possible your receipt will include not only the item’s serial number, but also the date it was placed in service. At this point, the average age of a LensRentals lens is 11 months. We intend to reduce that to 8 months by November.
2. Our checkout and inspection process now includes testing for front/back focus and focus accuracy as well as visual and mechanical inspection for every lens before each rental. We’ll be adding sharpness tests for each lens as soon as we can work out the process. Objective sharpness testing is complex, and we’re still working out the details.
3. Preface: we hate doing this, and it’s going to cause trouble with our suppliers. That said, we have a larger number of lenses being used each week than anyone else in the country. This provides some unique information, including which lenses are most likely to stop working. For example, Sigma lenses are not only far more likely than other brands to not work out of the box, they are far more likely to arrive not functioning after shipping or to develop problems while you’re using them. Beginning this month we will identify “high risk” lenses on the website. We do this because we think its important. We know, for example, that of all Canon lenses the 17-55 f/2.8 IS is most likely to develop electronic problems. We know that the Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 is three times more likely than any other lens to arrive not functioning or to lose calibration while you’re using it. You should know this too, so that you can be certain to allow an extra day to check for problems and allow replacement if necessary when renting one of these lenses.

Several people have asked, “If certain lenses are less reliable, why do you stock them?” To be honest, we’d love not to; they’re a pain and a money loser for us. The repair bills add up, as does the out of service time. But, our customers want them, so its our job to carry them. Often these are unique lenses without an alternative such as the Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 zoom or the Canon 17-55 f/2.8 IS. A lot of people want to try them for themselves before buying, and we’re going to support them. We have our own opinions, but those aren’t necessarily going to be the same as yours, since our needs and expectations as photographers are different. I’ve always said our most successful rental is one where the customer says “really didn’t like that lens, glad I tried it out before buying it”.

We’re looking for other things we can do to improve ourselves and appreciate suggestions any of you have to help us do better. We are comfortable our quality control is already the best in the lens rental business. But we want perfection— even if we can’t quite get there.

Roger Cicala
CEO, Lensrentals, Inc.