Give service in Trivandrum, not outside, say partners

When partners in Trivandrum complained that there was a long turn­around time
in getting service, distributors blamed it on the practice of sending the
defective products to Bengaluru or Cochin for repair and replacement. Needless
to say, partners therefore asked for the service issues to be resolved within
the city limits to make the process faster.

Post-sales service support, a sore point with most dealers, was one of the
issues that partners in Trivandrum also raised at The DQ Week IT Panchayat held
in the city on March 12, 2009. The event saw the participation of
represen­tatives from the leading distribution houses-Ingram Micro India,
Redington India, Rashi Peripherals and Neoteric Infomatique-as well as a room
full of channel partners. The channel community was represen­ted on the dias by
Prasad Oommen, President, All Kerala IT Dealers Associa­tion (AKITDA) and the
event was moderated by Vinita Bhatia, Executive Editor, DQ Channels.

Voicing his displeasure about sub-standard service support was Sunil of Cox
Infosystems, who said, “We do not get good post-sales support from distributors
for most products, like motherboards, RAMs, hard disk drives, etc.”

However, Rajesh Radhakrishnan of Redington India stated that service was
mostly delivered by vendors directly and most vendors had a policy which had to
be followed by the dealer and the end customer.

“We need to get support from vendors on this behalf and while I accept that
there are issues with the post-sales service offered, there is not much we can
do about it, because it falls outside our domain,” said Biju Joseph of Ingram
Micro India.

But Binoy Pazhoor of Pazhoor Group of Companies insisted that distributors
should ensure that the service should be provided locally, rather than in cities
outside Trivandrum.

Shenil Varghese of Neoteric Infomatique noted that the dealers too could help
minimize these incidents if they tried to resolve the problem at the first
level, themselves.

When a show of hands call on whether partners would be able to identify and
isolate these technical problems, revealed that most did not have the technical
know-how to do so. This shows that there is a pertinent need for vendors and
distributors to organize workshops and seminars where they could educate
partners on offering the first-level of support to the end customers.

Yet another case that was debated was the delay in getting backend
incentives.

The event saw presenta­tions by Symantec and Emerson Network Power, where
several of the 45 partners present were seen taking notes about the solutions
available with these two vendors.

Vinita Bhatia

vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in