Lenovo wants to be the differentiator in after sales service

With a ‘Different is Better’ philosophy, Lenovo Services is striving hard to bring delight to its customers by adopting innovative service delivery models. Sudipto Ghosh, Executive Director – Services, Lenovo India speaks to VARINDIA on its various service initiatives taken to differentiate itself from the rest and how Lenovo is trying to evolve the quality of its services in terms of use of new technologies -  

Service forms an important component for a consumer-centric brand like Lenovo. With new-age product challenges, it becomes imperative for a brand to engage with a customer at every phase of their journey. This places additional thrust on creating a seamless customer experience across all channels. 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 its customers by adopting innovative service delivery models.

Serving customers through smart services...

In a bid to simplify customer care, Lenovo has also added newer technologies like Big Data Analytics IoT and AI chatbots in the back-end to enhance its customer support system. “We term them as the Smart services. Our competition is nowhere close to offering such services to our customers. When we observed that 90% of our customers interact on voice channels, we turned on to these technologies to leverage it to our customers’ advantage. In fact, Lenovo is the first IT player to have partnered with NICE for a special customized software for speech analytics,” says Sudipto. 

In Big data, Lenovo uses the speech analytics. The advantage of big data is that they have a 100% check on sample size. Every call is monitored if whether the db level is normal or showing any abnormalities. “By this we will know whether the customer is happy or not,” he says.

Lenovo has various channels through which customers can reach them - app, call center, e-service and even chats. In the chat service, Lenovo has realized that there are typically 5 or 6 things that customers come looking for or want help. “We have developed an artificial intelligence (an auto chat) which we call it robotic chat. The machine answers automatically from the cue word. This is our chat service on Lenovo’s support website. The conversation gets intervened by our chat agents if the autochat cannot handle it on its own. The advantage here is that quite a few things can be solved without human intervention.”

When a customer needs a service, in several occasions he does not know how to contact Lenovo. In the newly developed IoT system, the customer on his desktop or notebook panel will have a QR code and the customer just has to scan it and he will get all the configuration of his Lenovo machine and that will automatically get linked to Lenovo’s call center. 

Soliciting Quick Response Time... 

Lenovo wants its services to be a differentiator. “There are instances when customers also take to social media to put up any complaints. Though it sounded like threat for us initially, we started taking it in our stride and decided to respond to all customer queries and complaints on social media, especially Twitter in less than 30 mins. It became a good opportunity for us. We are calling this – ‘Break the Wait’. All our initiatives are primarily leading towards 2 things - how much effort a customer has to do to reach a service provider and the acceptance resolution time (how much time the brand took to resolve the problem),” points out Sudipto.  

Additionally, Lenovo has built the concept of MITR (means friend) to treat its customers like a 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,” he sums up. 

Samrita Baruah
samrita@varindia.com

From ‘At’ your service to ‘App’ your service...

Of late, Lenovo has shifted its focus from ‘at your service’ to ‘app your service’. The company has taken a lot of initiatives to develop the Lenovo app, which has been designed for partners, customers and service engineers - 

Lencare app: Lencare App is a 24x7 service and is an innovative support channel where customers can conveniently track carry in center, check service order status, register a complaint and schedule a call.

Resolve App: Lenovo has empowered its own engineers too with an app. “Sometimes when a field engineer goes onsite to get a product fixed, he might need assistance from his back-end team. The app developed for this purpose is the Resolve App. This also does away any kind of delays that used to take place in the earlier system,” says Sudipto Ghosh.  

‘Speed of Light’ App: This app is built for Lenovo’s partners. “All our 2000 Business partners have to register with us. Once he gets registered and becomes our authorised partner, he gets this app with him,” says Sudipto. There are instances when customers would like to upgrade warranty or add-ons like accidental damage protection, change an offsite warranty to an onsite warranty and so on. The Speed of Light app is for extending warranty. “Henceforth any customer who walks into a store, the partner just needs to see what product type he has and can then search in the app and immediately gets the price list for it, corresponding to the number of year that he wants his warranty to be extended. The registration detail will also reach the customer immediately,” he explains.

Tags: Lenovo, lenovo india, Sudipto Ghosh lenovo india, big data, mitr