It was a different story for the D-Link group 18 months ago when it came to after-sales service and support. “With all its focus on manufacturing and distribution, the customer-service department badly needed a re-look,” said BB Chougula, GM-Services, D-Link, who took up the responsibility of building an efficient and effective service network.

Today, the D-Link group (including Gigabyte) has proudly presented a sophisticated and professional network of 16 service centers that can easily outdo the best of all service centers in India. Earlier, although D-Link had four service centers, it had to mostly depend on the main service center it had in Goa.

However, with growing volumes, increasing product range and expanding reach, it was not possible to keep customers happy. “The turnaround time was most crucial, which was not possible with just four centers,” said Chougual.

The current network of service centers are strategically divided into four hubs with a key full-fledged service center operating from each hub. These hubs are connected to the remaining 12 centers, which are located strategically so that a customer can reach any one of these centers within eight hours.

All the hubs are equipped to handle level-three type of service, whereas all the local centers attached to these hubs are fine-tuned to service level-one and two services. Level-four support center attends to design faults, and hence is available only at the factory.

What makes these service centers unique is that all of them belong to the group itself and nothing is outsourced to any other franchisee outlets. In all, there are about 92 employees, with an additional 40 in the factory.

According to Chougula, almost 98 percent cases are repaired locally and only two percent cases are sent to level-four center. Interestingly, 90 percent of the calls are completed either on the same day or the next business day.

“We value our customers and understand their business and margin. And for this we have a very unique facility call the across the counter (ATC) service, which attends and completes the call on the same day,” said Chougula.

According to Chougula, D-Link understands that most customers come to them from far off places and to make them have to come again is not fair. “We know that their margins are not so big for them to visit us again and again. And for such customers we have the ATC service where most calls are completed on the same day,” he added.

While most of the cases attended at these service centers are within the products' warranty period, about 10 percent of the calls that come in are out-of-warranty cases. Unlike other service centers in India, D-Links does not levy any service charge on them, if the case is not solved for an out-of-warranty product.

About four months back D-Link also deployed web-based CRM to handle customer support. “Every product is bar-coded and connected to the CRM system. With this system in place, we are able to monitor the status of each and every call being logged in from any of our centers,” informed Chougula.

In the next few months, the company is also looking at adding six more services centers. These would be located strategically in B and C class cities. However, these centers will be more of collection centers. “We are also contemplating appointment of authorized service providers (ASP) in C class cities for level-two repairs in the future,” said Chougula.

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