Lenovo sets up post-sales support

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Lenovo India has discontinued a five-year-old agreement with IBM for post-sales service and support for its range of desktops and notebooks. The Chinese PC maker will now manage on its own the service partner network.

Sudipto Ghosh, executive director, Services, Lenovo India, explained the reasons. "Following our acquisition of IBM's PC business, in India we had signed an agreement whereby IBM would mange our post-sales service. We decided to discontinue the contract this year since we need to cover a larger territory and increase the scale of operations. Also, the cost of service delivery through an outsourced relationship proved to be expensive especially in the current market scenario. In addition, our entry in the smartphone market demanded that we set up our own separate support infrastructure."

"We started creating our own service platform and infrastructure six months back, and yet in this short time we have managed to put a very strong infrastructure in place using our global processes and best practices," said Ghosh.

Lenovo now has a separate service partner network for the consumer and SMB (CSMB), and the enterprise segments. It has signed on 37 national and regional ASPs with a coverage of more than 700 towns and 28,700 pin codes for both segments.

"Of the 37, five national ASPs have been appointed for the CSMB segment while 32 ASPs will cater to enterprise customers. Separately, for our smartphone business, we have created an ASP network of 160 partners covering 150 cities with a plan to scale it upto 600 ASPs covering more than 1,000 cities and towns by the end of 2014," informed Ghosh.

"Having our own service infrastructure is helping us to respond faster to customer needs. We are already seeing an enhancement in customer experience, and the cost of our post-sales operations is coming down considerably."

Ghosh expressed confidence that Lenovo will now be able to improve the responsiveness and turn-around of the post-sales services offered. "Today we provide onsite warranty on all our PC products for both CSMB and enterprise customers. We are confident of improving the turn-around of these services."

With the service infrastructure in place Lenovo is now planning to introduce several new services for its enterprise customers. "We have started offering several value-added services such as migration services, tech refresh, asset lifecycle management and other advanced services which were earlier provided by IBM," said Ghosh.