Agartala laments service issues

The DQ Week reached Agartala, the capital of Tripura on November 28, with an objective of heeding to market concerns and help partners provide the much needed ‘safety valve' to escalate their concerns mainly featuring as bad-debts, service issues and market encroachment alongwith hardware and software supply shortage.

Flowing with the norm, Symantec was up ante in presenting an audience of 35 channel partners at Hotel Rajdhani with their hand-outs, portfolio and business plans for Agartala receiving an overwhelming response; both as questions and concerns as well as feasibility and potential business enquiries.

In the most important part of the saga, the association partner IT Association of Tripura (ITAT) took over the stage. Sounding very professional in their approach and confident about their stance and performance in the market, the association did not take the opportunity to first address their achievements, but rather focused on the market issues and ask for alarming conclusions.

The main problem, both according to the association as well as the delegates attending the event are service issues where the association clearly pointed out 5 major vendors allegedly having poor standards in service quality.

"It takes months to complete a service call. The main problem in Agartala is not just about any bad debts or credit problems, but about service. As an instance, one of our members had sent a printer for servicing in September and he is yet to receive a response," said Biswanath Das, president, ITAT.

"The main problem here is the turnaround time of service. Particularly 3 vendors have too many issues here and even after repeatedly pointing out the issues to them, we have not got a satisfactory response," said Subhas Modak, chairman, ITAT.

As service issues continued to rage on throughout the meet, dealers in the area also pointed out to the lack of effective sales-points in Agartala whereby the city has just remained focussed over reselling and retailing. Even as the government projects do push up the market momentum in the state, a major chunk is taken over by vendors directly with the channels left seemingly dry.

As The DQ Week bid farewell to Agartala with the assurance of voicing the concerns of the channels partners, ITAT seemed keen and recharged with vigour to fight off credit issues in the market and renew their executive board.