Whose baby is service, anyway?

Nashik

August 20th, 2007

When a dealer sells a product to a customer and the latter faces some service
issue, who should ultimately be held responsible for offering the service?
Should it be the dealer who should face the customer's ire or should it be the
distributor or the vendor?

This was the burning question that was raised at the IT Panchayat at Nashik
on 18th August 2007. Vikas Kakani of Redington India, Santosh Dalmia of Rashi
Peripherals, Milind Modi of Neoteric Infomatique, of Ingram Micro and Yogesh
Sharma of Cyberstar Infocom represented the distributors. Vinita Bhatia,
Executive Editor of DQ Channels moderated the issue.

Raising the issue, Sudhir Mishra, President of Channel Association of Nashik
noted that since the vendors manufactured the products they should take the
ultimate responsibility for providing the service rather than using the
distributors for providing the support.

Voicing the concerns of the channel, he added that often when products have
to be serviced, though return of material authorization has been raised, service
centers outside the city refuse to accept the damaged product if it is sent via
a courier company. "They insist that we bring it to the Pune service center
personally which means waste of time, productivity and money for us," he
said. Distributors were surprised to hear about this and assured him that they
would get more details about why couriers were not accepted for service issues.
Kakani promised to revert to the channel community within a week. But this also
threw up the issue of who will then take up the responsibility for products
damaged in transit, for which no decision was reached.

Service, service, service

Sanat Jain of Acer Cybertech noted that another issue with post-sales support
is the poor quality of service offered by the service centers. "Often when
we call up the toll free numbers, the personnel there are unable to address our
problems. They just give us some vague replies and are rude too at times,"
he said.

To this Santosh Dalmia informed the partners that Rashi has recently opened a
service center at Nashik. But he also stated that some vendors offer service
directly in which case there is not much that the distys can do. Kakani added to
this saying that it is important that continuous interaction between the channel
and distribution so that specific issues related to service could be addressed.

Milind Kulkarni of Intralink then spoke about the delayed turnaround time for
replacement or repair. Both Kakani and Dalmia mentioned that their company
offers a turnaround time of 15 days. Sharma stated that if Cyberstar was unable
to replace or repair a product within 15 days, it issues a credit note to the
customer, allaying channel fears.

One more suggestion that came up for improving the service setup was to
collection centers to ease the service pick up and drop network. Partners also
suggested that vendors be brought at a similar platform like the IT Panchayat.