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Dealers
in Raipur are up in arms over the various
issues that vendors have been responsible for. Not restricted to
any
particular product category or any one vendor, resellers who are
front ending with the customer have had to bear the brunt from that
side thereby impacting their reputation besides affecting the brand
ultimately.
Raipur, being the capital, is one of the major IT markets in the
state but dealers here have had to contend with vendors when it comes
to servicing. Devender Marwa of The Compu Services said, "We are
facing issues with Seagate's service especially because of the long
delays in getting products serviced. While it used to earlier take
around three to five days to get a hard disk drive serviced, now the
same takes around 40-45 days. They are making excuses like asking us
to download this and that and bring it to them and even ask us to get
the original policy of the hard disk. For something I sold six months
back, who is going to store this on record? Two years back their
service was really good but now it is one of the worst."
Raipur Infotech's Sona Dewan concurred with Marwa, "Seagate has
made the whole servicing process a lot more difficult by demanding
original bills and packaging of devices that were sold many months or
years back. Which customer is going to keep such collateral with him
after so long? Earlier they used to just check the serial warranty
number and assess the warranty applicable to the product and get it
serviced accordingly. Now it seems as if servicing is like a
liability for vendors especially with a service lock-in period on
three-year or five-year warranties."
Kailash Maheshwari of Fortune Infotech has faced problems with Epson
printers and Acer notebooks. "The local service centers keep
giving excuses for not servicing the products and try and put the
blame on us for whatever damage that has happened. On the other hand
we have to face the ire from the customer's side," said
Maheshwari.
Another aggrieved dealer of Acer notebooks is Pankaj Chopra of
Creative Computers. "There are many who are
service
linked issues with vendors like Acer and HCL. I will narrate one
specific incident. A customer of mine came and bought an Acer laptop
from me but returned it the next day saying there were problems with
the display. I sent it to the service center and after 10 days, I got
it back, however there were scratches on the screen which the client
refused to accept especially since it was a new piece. I sent it back
to the service center with the specific complaint but even after one
year now they have not done anything about it. They are acting
childishly by saying that it was the customer who made the scratches
on the screen. This is clearly immature treatment on part of
vendors," shared Chopra.
So, how do partners deal with the matter? "We have no choice but
to send the product to service centers in bigger cities like Delhi
and Mumbai and foot the freight charges ourselves," said
Maheshwari. For others, they have to resort to methods like creating
a duplicate bill copy. "I have to make a duplicate photocopy of
the bill with all the right dates and send that to the service center
just so that I do not lose my customer base," signed off Dewan.