"Strong after-sales support is helping SanDisk to win accolades"

 Urvashi Sheth,
Sr Director, Global Customer Support, SanDisk Corporation

With a mission to enrich people's lives through digital storage anytime, anywhere, SanDisk delivers peace of mind that data is readily available and reliable, even in the most challenging environments. As a result, it has retained its top position with 35-per cent market share in India across all three categories – microSD cards, SD cards and flash drives. SanDisk actually touches a wide spectrum of storage solutions in many areas, including Data Center, Computing, Mobile and Consumer Electronics. Elaborating more on the company’s position, its channel strategy and after-sales support, Urvashi Sheth, Sr Director, Global Customer Support, SanDisk Corporation, has had an exclusive interaction with VARINDIA. Edited excerpts:

What is the major segment where SanDisk is concentrating on right now?
We are flash memory manufacturers and we create solutions. Our focus is on creating innovative solutions and products which are flash based in both sectors – OEM and retail. OEM mostly goes to enterprises and retail goes to consumers and we innovate in both spaces.

What is your strategy around support?
My support organization is basically catering to all the countries, except for the embargo countries like North Korea or Iraq. We are everywhere. I often get calls/e-mails from countries which I have no idea about so I have to go on Wikipedia and find out where that country is. Our support in phone call and chat is available in 16 different languages and we have call centres worldwide.
Our support team is very culturally diverse and is adjusted according to the culture/country which requires us to make sure that we respond to that culture’s need. For India, we have all these services like knowledge-based, SMS, Live Chat, Phone calls, Forums, Reviews plus more. We have about 20 depots in 20 different cities in India where you can physically go and get your warranty replaced. If you want, we can mail it to you too. When you give a call to SanDisk, you are provided with an RMA number (Return Merchandise Authorization), we SMS it to you, you take that SMS to our depot in Nehru Place and you will get an immediate replacement.

How important is after-sales service for SanDisk?
Yes, of course. It is extremely important we think. This is SanDisk’s philosophy and that philosophy has helped us win the Gartner Award as well. As a customer service organization, we received a Gartner Gold Award for best customer experience in the world. We got this award six months ago and it is a big honour for us. As a company, we need to maintain and establish trust with our customers and we can only do that when we are providing the world-class services and tools and difference channels for our customers.

For a company like SanDisk, which has a global presence, what kind of challenges do you face?
More than challenges, it is a learning process. But of course like any big company, we have challenges and they help us to improve. The biggest opportunity we have is – different cultures. For example, we all have a USB Drive. Suppose one customer is in China, another in Japan and yet another  in India. We have the same USB drive and the same questions about the drive. But all the three will approach differenlty for they belong to three different parts of the world. Like being in China, the customer might want to go to the service centre, the other being in Japan only wants the answers on the phone and the customer who is in India might just want to use an SMS as a means for his questions to be answered. We need to make sure we are providing culturally appropriate responses to our customers. Other than that, the challenge is that it takes time to understand any culture. My team and SanDisk genuinely believes in listening to the customers in order to understand them. Listening to them will help us in giving them the best support.

How do you measure the level of customer’s satisfaction?
We send surveys after every call, chat, e-mail and every single interaction we have. Our survey return rate is very high and our customer’s satisfaction rate in India is 92 per cent which is extremely high. We do listen to our customers every single day. In the survey, we allow and encourage our customers to give us comments on how to improve, what more would they like us to do.

These days, there is a tussle between offline and online distribution models. Some of the companies like to sell their products via traditional channel, while some prefer e-commerce portals. What is your take on this?
Our take on this is that we support both. Our channel partners are extremely important to us and we support them. Even e-commerce is very important and we support them as well. But channel partners have been there traditionally and we have a long partnership with them and hence nothing is going to change in terms of support and the way in which we are doing our business with them especially from customer’s service perspectives.

What are your plans for 2015?
SanDisk is continuously coming up with new products. The latest one we came up with is the iXpand flash drive in the global market. Like we have a Dual Drive for the Android phones, our iXpand drive is for the iPhones. So we are continuosly working on getting new products for our customers. The iXpand will release very soon for India and it is a USB drive for the iPhone, most probably by late Q1 2015 or early Q2.
satinder@varindia.com