Spotlight on Service Innovations | ChannelDrive.in
Whether it is using cutting-edge Internet of Things driven technology adoption or taking advantage of the company’s innovative Research and Development activities – Canon’s C-TEC Center is quite uniquely stretching the boundaries of enhancing service experience for its customers in India.
Rahul Goel, Director-Market Engineering, Canon India interacts with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s focus towards service and its future plans.
Today if you look at this particular facility- the Canon Technical Excellence Centre (C-TEC) centre, what does this facility mean for the overall Canon operations in India?
To sell any product in India there is a big market and we have all types of customers to purchase Canon products but how we service those products is the main thing and big differentiator. Therefore, our CEO thought that we must have a centre where not only can we train our people but we can do a lot of simulations and bring our customers to this centre.
We are here for customers to be rest assured that Canon is right behind them. We have technical experts, we have our engineers we have an excellent training facility, we have an excellent simulation facility, and whatever issues our customers face, will be resolved. Therefore, this centre is one of the most important parts of the Canon India business.
As a fulfilment part of the experience for the customer, how do you think a facility like this is helping you in terms of gaining more loyalty from the customers or market share in terms of selling the products?
Indirectly what happens is that whenever a customer purchases a product either he’s already used a Canon product and is already satisfied with the services, therefore, he is related to Canon or, sometimes a friend might tell them to purchase a Canon camera because they think it is an excellent product. He may not have experienced the service part of our business but he would have used a Canon camera hence he has recommended it. So these are the two things but the third thing is that when we sell our products and if the customer faces an issue, how fast can we respond to it?
Or even before we sell a service when we go to a customer for negotiations, they have some requirements like, I want my uptime to be 98%, I want my service to be done on Saturdays as well as Sundays.
All these things are designed and then we go back to the customer, then when the customer says that okay that is how Canon is listening to us and this is how they are designing their service approach and coming back to us then that is the confidence they have in our service.
Secondly, it happens sometimes that we take customers like photographers to the service centre upstairs and they get convinced about the fact that when they send their cameras to Canon they have a highly trained and skilled workforce and nothing will happen to it. So these types of centres help in creating a brand image for Canon which helps in bringing repeat business or acquiring new business that is why we have put so much effort in making this centre.
On the technology side, what are some of the innovative technologies that you are implementing on the service or repair front which should cement your position?
We want to differentiate ourselves from our competitors because product differentiation is becoming very difficult. It is the service that differentiates competition, so what we want to listen to the customer and design our services according to their needs. That is where we have put a lot of effort into the technology implementation. Some efforts are being made by the R&D team as I explained that we have our E- maintenance, so it means that the machine itself is reading the data, compiling it and sending the data to a server.
At the back end, we have our technical people who can read the data and design it, whatever we want to do, wherever intervention is required, where we have to talk to the IT people on the customer end, everything is resolved. And the second part is predictive maintenance, because of the internet the machines are connected to a server, so we can predict the failure of a product. That is the latest thing.
Is it something similar to the IoT based service?
Absolutely, so because the internet of things keeps it connected all MFDs are connected to the customer environment. If the customer allows, we can operate those machines from a remote and that is IoT.
So we get the data, we do the analysis of the data, we dispatch our engineer, we dispatch the consumables or we talk to the customer. This technology is helping us give final response time to the customer. That is what a customer wants, if he has a product, it should not fail. If it fails an engineer or a technician should be there. So what we want to do is ensure this doesn’t fail and before it fails our person should be there with all the required spare parts or the consumables which will keep the machine in working condition, that is how we are trying to work.
To what extent do you think you have automation within this whole infrastructure that you have and what is the scope of furthering that?
It varies, if I talk about cities like Delhi and Mumbai or Gurgaon or Bangalore wherever in India the internet is fast and reliable, we are able to use technology to the fullest but if we go to smaller towns where the internet speed or its availability of network across 24 hours is low then it becomes a problem.
So we are able to use our R&D technology which has been implemented in machines in mini-metros, metros and smaller towns to a very large extent. Approximately 77% of our machines are already connected to the E-maintenance portal but when it goes to a very small town, there is no problem with the machine but the infrastructure that we have in India currently. From what I see, this is changing too fast.
In the last two years, the growth of the Internet even in smaller towns with very good reliability has happened so it doesn’t break so fast. That is helping us give very fast responses to customers who are in very remote places. The best example is your bank.
My guidelines to the banks are that you have to open your branches in the remotest parts of India so they need have a printer or they need to have a device and they have connectivity for checking balances and ATMs, etc. and we have to provide services there.
So the internet of things has helped us provide very fast services to the customers who are situated in such remote areas that helps us. We diagnose in Delhi and we tell the guy in the remotest area to do a certain thing for him which makes it very easy. So this is how technology is helping us.
What is the typical turn around time currently and idealistic goal that you are looking at?
It totally depends on the customer, so as I explained when we go to a customer at the negotiation level we ask him what he wants? I can give a 24*7 service, I can give a response time, I can give a next-day response time or I can give a three hour response time.
Of course, there will be charges. Or if the customer says standards, so a standard differs from product to product. For printers it is a four hour response time. But if the customer says 24*7, I know I want a service from Monday to Saturday till morning 9 to 7 pm.
Tell us something about the future roadmap of the service like this?
India is growing, and it is growing very fast. How do we service our products in those smaller towns? I don’t have an issue in Delhi, in Agra, in Lucknow, etc. But when a product is purchased 150km from Lucknow. How do I service there? I can appoint a service centre, we have enough technical workforce in India which is available across the country. But how do I arrange the spare parts on time? How do I predict the error?
This is how technology is helping us manage our inventory in such a way that whenever the spare part for the consumer is required, it is available well in time. So we’ll keep on growing and this centre will keep on helping us in training people, in simulation and helping us plan our spare part inventory or make the customer appreciate our efforts and in the end delight them.
But do you see more and more use of IoT based technology?
That is what we are using because once the customer allows us, okay please connect my network to your server then for us it is quite easy. But to convince the customer to do this takes time because it becomes a threat to security of the data. You give them the paper, they go through it. If they have any issues we get back to them and help them understand because what I have seen is that people are ready to accept this technology, for them it is their product working without any issue. So they are readily accepting it.
On the service front, there are a few brands having different policies for online and offline selling so they support offline selling products but not online. Is there anything that you also have on these lines or you?
We have a very robust system for any product that has been purchased by the customer from Canon, both online and offline. You can go to the website, fill in your serial number, it will automatically authenticate.
So if you call the service centre, the agent will just ask for the serial number. And if the serial number has not been purchased from the Canon India network, we will know it. There we can differentiate. We do not say no, we just change the services SLAs, the service charges. But if the product has been purchased off Amazon, Flipkart or offline, we do not differentiate as long as it is a Canon product.
