Benq India Pvt Ltd has just signed an agreement with Onida to ser-vice its
entire range of mobile products in India. Presently Benq has Accel ICIM and
Ultima as service providers for its IT products, while the former also services
its mobile range. Onida will be presently only servicing its mobiles.
"To start with, Onida would be looking at Level 1 and 2 type of repairs
which mostly com-prise of problems with the battery, software etc. Onida has
immense penetration in the country with more than 150 service centers for its
own pro-ducts. Presently these centers are for Onida’s consumer elec-tronics
product range, there-fore, talks are still on finalizing the servicing
procedures for IT products," disclosed Ashish Bakshi, Country Head, Benq
India.
This latest move is part of Benq process of strengthening its service network
across India. "Benq is aggressive about the Indian market, therefore,
gett-ing our infrastructure set in India was our first priority. Initi-ally our
service centers were present only across 17 cities but now we are present in 50
to 60 cities. There were 21 ser-vice centers initially but now there are 175
service centers across all the product lines. It was also essential for Benq to
venture into the growing metros which are the B, C and D class cities,"
pointed out Bakshi.
In fact, Benq recently has also consolidated its service offering nationwide
by starting a franchisee model service centers at Lamington Road in Mumbai and
Nehru Place in New Delhi. Benq also plans to cover Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata
by April 2004 and also some other important cities like Hyderabad, Ahmedabad,
Lucknow and Pune by June 2004.
The company has also launched a national toll free helpline number to address
end-customer queries. An intranet that will be fully ope-rational by March 2004
will provide Benq dealers easy and immediate access to inventory control, spares
management, warranty authorization and online RMA (Repair Material
Authorization). Over and above an online presence, Benq has planned four
inventory/spares hubs located at Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai that is
slated to strategically look after dealers’ requirements nationwide.
On increasing its brand presence, Benq has already started taking retail
initia-tives. "We have retail conce-pts called Benq corner and Benq spot
which will be soon visible at a few large retail outlets. And this year our
focus will be to make our brand presence felt thro-ugh such initiatives. Last
year we wanted to concentrate our ene-rgies on setting up the infra-structure
and the distribution channel in place but the year 2004 would be to make Benq a
household name," added Bak-shi. Presently Benq’s distribu-tors include
eSys for display and mobiles, Godrej for proje-ctors and plasma, Ingram Micro
for input devices, Jupiter for media, and Tech Pacific for storage and imaging
products.
Nancy Sudheer
Mumbai