Over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to visit several cities for The DQ Week IT Panchayat. And the one issue that crops up without fail at almost all these events is that of post-sales service.

What is most startling ones is ignorance that partners had about service, warranty and dead on arrival (DoA) policies of the vendors whose products they were selling.

In all fairness, it is true that most of the leading brands do need to improve their existing post-sales service infrastructure in the country, and pronto. But can the entire blame be shifted onto the vendors alone, if the partners do not even try to read through the fine print of their product sales agreement and know the service terms of the products they are selling?

One partner even claimed at an IT Panchayat that if his service-related issue was not resolved to his satisfaction, he would withhold the payment to his customer, who in this case was a sub-distributor.

The sub-distributor later admitted on the side lines of the event, that there were several instances where he had to replace faulty products from his stock to dealers, but in turn had to wait for several weeks for getting a replacement from the vendor himself. And during that time frame, his supplier had already debited his account for the payment of that very faulty or DoA product!

This is a very ad hoc way of running business and someday one of the parties involved will suffer heavily in the bargain. While continuing to pressurize vendors to offer better and faster post-sales support, it is also important that partners at least acquaint themselves with the process and policies that vendor have for offering post-sales support.

If you were a customer buying a TV from a showroom would you not inquire about the warranty terms before purchase? Then why is there such nonchalance about learning about warranty terms for the products that you are selling?

In fact, one distributor even pointed out that in most cases, if dealers took the pain of understanding what the problem with a product was when a customer brought it in, they could resolve it at their end with some basic training. But he lamented that very few partners took these pains.

This attitude towards service needs to be changed, starting with the partners themselves. They need to equip themselves with the requisite knowledge of warranty policies of their principal companies. Once they are armed with this information, they can get better service as they would know the proper channels, protocol to follow for it and the exact ways to escalate the issue further as well.

So instead of passing the buck of service to the next level of your channel, why not try and learn something about it yourself. That knowledge won't hurt you, but will hold you in good stead, instead.

In the meantime, all you readers will notice that DQ Channels has undergone a transformation of sorts in terms of the layout of our articles and the way we present our content to you. It has always been our endeavor to gather feedback from our readers on a regular basis and then work on it.

This new look of DQ Channels is yet another result of this very endeavor. And now we would love to get further feedback from you on what you think about it. So please sent your comments, suggestions or criticisms to me.

VINITA BHATIA
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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