'Customer's need is placed at the center of all services by brands nowadays'

Sudipto Ghosh, Executive Director – Services - Lenovo India

With its vast demographic, knowledge levels, infrastructure availability and distinct usage habits, India presents a very unique market opportunity.Today, the Indian market receives the latest products and refreshes almost at par with its global counterparts. This leaves the Indian consumer spoilt for choice across all price points when it comes to high-end features. A consumer, today, judges the entire experience, including responsiveness, value-added services and post-sales support prior to a purchase decision.With the ever-increasing digitization in India, your urban consumer is well informed and also quick to share their positive or negative experiences in real-time. On the other hand, unstable power conditions in tier II cities often results in higher failure rate. Also, the vast geography poses innumerable logistical challenges.

For a consumer-centric brand like Lenovo, these new-age challenges place additional thrust on creating a seamless customer experience across all channels. It is imperative to engage with a customer at every phase of their journey with the brand.As cutting-edge product features become increasingly mainstay, PC players are required to look for differentiation outside the product functionality in a bid to deliver a wholesome brand experience. As a result, after-sales service has become the unique selling proposition and one of the most critical pieces in the entire customer-centricity puzzle. With a ‘Different is Better’ philosophy, Lenovo Services is striving hard to bring delight to our customers by adopting innovative service delivery models.

Innovative Customer experience

Our core philosophy of ‘Customer Centricity’ enforces placing customer’s need at the center of all our service initiatives. This value chain is observed throughout the organization right from the chairman to last mile consisting of field force who regularly meet customers and incorporate their feedback for proactive corrective actions. We have introduced core KPIs like turn-around-time (TAT), acceptable-resolution-time (ART), first-time-resolution (FRT) which are tracked and measured against a Customer Delight Score.

Additionally, we have built the concept of MITR (Hindi word “MITR” means friend) to treat our customers like our friend.This mindset helps deliver a better and friendly service. We capture “MITR” moments in our daily service experiences and share them in our periodic service communication. This helps to keep the value alive across delivery functions.

In a bid to simplify customer care, we have added newer technologies like Big Data Analytics and AI chatbots in the back-end to enhance our customer support system. When we observed that 90% of our customers interact on voice channels, we tuned the AI engine to understand and validate the customer requirement using certain criteria. In fact, Lenovo is the first IT player to have partnered with NICE for a special customized software for speech analytics