Brother to service Accel ICIM products

Mumbai-based Brother International has tied up with Accel ICIM Frontline as
its national service partner. The latter will provide third party service for
the vendor's range of inkjet and laser multi function devices (MFDs) as well
as fax machines.

This arrangement will come into effect from March 1, 2005 and will be branded
as 'Brother At Your Side' support. Brother's national distributor, Godrej
& Boyce, earlier serviced these machines through its 14 outlets.

Accel is present in 35 loca-tions and Brother hopes that this wide footprint
would improve customer satisfa-ction, translating into better prospective sales.
RS Anand Kumar, Country Manager, Brother International, said, "With a
neutral service provider in the picture, customers can expect a better level of
support, and across more cities."

He revealed that the revenue sharing model between Bro-ther and Accel was
dependent on the model and price of each product during the warranty period.
Post-warranty, Accel had a direct database of pro-spective customers that it
could convert into its AMC clients.

To give a fillip to its service initiative, Brother will also work with Accel
to launch service weeks at Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai. Every week,
customers in each city can bring in their Brother machines for a free service at
the local Accel centers. "We will even provide support to those machines
that have been purchased outside India," added Anand.

Brother will also launch a new range of inkjet MFDs for the home and SOHO
seg-ments in March 2005. "We are calling this the 'Lifestyle series'.
At the moment, we have MFDs for corporate users only and now we are widening our
offering to address more markets," added Anand. He is waiting for the
budget to be  declared before factoring in the duty prices and deciding the
final retail prices of these products.

Vinita Bhatia

Mumbai