Customer Loyalty has always been the Strongest Pillar of Growth for Xerox
Undoubtedly, to impart today’s real-virtues of business ecosystem- reliability, progression, service and best value are squared to go-ready in the market. Complex technologies and their rigorous aptness are adhered by the organization to proliferate in the dynamic market segment.
Anurag Gupta recently appointed to Director-CSO, Xerox India has sized with the company since the last three decade and has made a significant contribution to the Xerox India business.
In a candid chat with BiS Infotech, he sharply cogitates on his new role and peerless business strategies to put in front the company’s principles to the next level of ‘Business Tier’. Excerpts.
What are the first-hand changes you are striving to bring with your new role as Director-CSO?
Xerox has a very strong customer service operations function in the industry, as a result of which we have a great many number of repeat customers in our businesses. In my new role as the Director of this business, I am looking at further strengthen our service delivery and increasing productivity and efficiency of my team members & channel partners, thereby delivering even better value for our customers. This will also help our partners to grow their business.
We are looking at new and better training modules for our channel partners and engineers and also increasing their frequencies and our one on one interaction, helping each individual to grow within the team.
Xerox Service Operations have been a benchmark for the industry and we will continue to work to further enhance our overall value proposition for our customers and our channel partners. The technology prowess and operational excellence of Xerox gives us with a great advantage to deliver better support, service and eventually better value for our customers.
Has the new role intensified your flexibility to gain customers loyalty and which verticals you aim to address for a growth in your tenure?
Customer loyalty has always been the strongest pillar of growth for Xerox. In our technology business, more than 70% of our customers are repeat customers. Therefore, you can understand how critical it is for us. This requires a lot of rigor and effort at the back-end in to address customer queries, help them with solutions to their problems on a real time basis and also upgrade and grow their business.
As for verticals, we have always looked to tap customers across all verticals inclusive of SMBs, mid to large scale enterprises and our focus is going to continue to deliver better support & service around the same.
How the Partner ecosystem evolved over the years for Xerox and what are the next levels of changes do you discover.
In the Technology & Channels business, Xerox GTM is primarily through partners. Working with over 200 partners in India alone, Xerox ensures that the partners are well equipped and strongly supported to win deals in the marketplace. Xerox has two types of partners – the Sales-only partners and the Sales & Service Partners (SSPs). All these partners are managed by Xerox Partner Business Managers who help the partners in expanding their business through business planning, sales planning, sales support and partner training.
We are also now training select channel partners to deliver our Managed Print Services solutions.
Overall, Xerox is a very partner friendly organization and we constantly engage with our partners to understand their challenges and how we can help them overcome these issues in the shortest period of time.
Do you have partner training programs? If yes, what kind of training do you provide to partners and how many times do you conduct these partner training programs?
We offer a comprehensive 360o channel programme for our channel partners consisting to 12 channel levers and training programs are an intrinsic part of it. We conduct regular channel programmes that include face-2-face sessions as well as e-learning modules. The emphasis is always to equip them with what is required for them to solve customers’ issues and win in the market. For this we are committed to use technology in a way that makes this learning process more efficient, effective and easily accessible.
We have also started few unique programs which help our engineers and partners understand the technical elements better and will help them ensure customer satisfaction. Few of these programs are:
Fully Trained Xerox –This training happens on a monthly and quarterly basis depending on location and product for which the training is being held. We inform our partners and engineers of any new trends in the market and if there are any new tools that we have introduced.
Eureka – This program is unique to Xerox and this certainly gives us a huge edge over our competitors. This is a database of information which can be accessed by any engineer sitting at any corner, if they are connected to our server. This gives the engineers an edge in terms of time to resolve issues.
Perfect call – We have introduced this program last year and we have already seen good success. This training helps our partner engineers to understand the right way to reach out to a customer and how to better handle the queries and questions.
How do you involve partners in the service related issues?
Most of our office equipment related service is delivered through our certified partners classified as Sales & Service partners or SSP’s. All the SSP’s have to meet the certification criteria that include their infrastructure, manpower resources and they need to undergo the prescribed trainings. We also keep a continuous tab on the quality of the service outcome and adherence to process & policies through our certification process and the SSP’s that qualify for the highest tier also get additional financial benefits and privileges as an incentive.
This ensures that our partners deliver high level of service to our customers and are continuously incentivized to improve their performance.
Where are the particular market reach of Xerox in India and how do you strive to address the customer issues on real time basis?
For our technology business, we have a countrywide reach and this is done through an indirect model i.e. via channel partners.
Xerox has a centralized call centre for all direct customer contract, which is a standalone call centre for solving customer’s breakdown calls/ queries where it caters to the entire production range, high-end A3 office products space along with warranty management for A4 office devices. Also, Xerox has an innovative system, which directly links customers to the engineers, who can then address the issues the customer is facing. Through this system, within a few minutes of the customer’s call, the engineer gets an SMS regarding the customer’s details as well as the problem. Xerox aligns its field workforce in such a way that the customers are mapped to a specific engineer who knows the operations and the fleet of this customer very well. This helps to build a long-term relationship with the customer and improve overall machine performance with improved uptime. In case of any repeated or unresolved problems, customers can escalate the problem to the Xerox “WE CARE” platform through a phone, email or web.
What are the Xerox’s Innovative systems, which directly link customers to the engineers?
As mentioned above, Xerox has an innovative system, which directly links customers to the engineers, who can then address the issues the customer is facing. Through this system, within a few minutes of the customer’s call, the engineer gets an SMS regarding the customer’s details as well as the problem. Xerox aligns its field workforce in such a way that the customers are mapped to a specific engineer who knows the operations and the fleet of this customer very well.
To further strengthen the customer issue resolution, Xerox has a repository of world wide data base of all the technical issues faced till date on a particular model , where an engineer can easily access the data base and find a solution to the relevant technical problem and fix the customer issues faster.
Additionally, customers can also reach out to Xerox directly though the “WE CARE” platform.
Any initiatives to train customers end?
While most of our equipment is easy to use and does not require any complex training, we do provide operator training where required. We also analyse the issues that are raised to our helpline and if there are some repeat issues can be addressed by a simple training or guide, we provide that information to our customers so that they can avoid such issues in future.
The growth expectation of Xerox keeping a channel front strategy?
While we cannot directly comment on growth, but surely Xerox is set for a strong growth in 2015-16, especially with the new training modules being brought in for channel partners. We have some strong production equipments that were launched early this year and we will continue to build our portfolio of products and entrench the respective markets effectively.
