"Xerox never compromises on service delivery"

Balaji Rajagopalan,
Executive Director – Operations and Lean Six Sigma,
Xerox India

Since the invention of Xerography more than 75 years ago, the people at Xerox have been continuously helping businesses to simplify the way work gets done. With its presence in India since 1985 and as the leader in the office automation and document management services, Xerox has been dedicatedly following this practice for almost 30 years now.

In India, Xerox focusses on two businesses: one is Technology & Channels business (T&C) – that deals with sales of equipment and consumables to corporates and SMEs, and the other one is the Global Document Outsourcing (GDO) business that provides Document Management Solutions including Managed Print Services, Communication & Marketing Services and Document Transaction Processing Services for large business houses.

Customer Service Operations supports both these businesses. While GDO is a direct business, T&C business is driven through partners, and the partners become critical to service delivery for Xerox. VARINDIA recently got an opportunity to meet Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director – Operations and Lean Six Sigma, Xerox India, to discuss the company’s customer service, supply chain and operations strategy for the Indian market.
 
Xerox partner ecosystem
In the Technology & Channels business, Xerox GTM is primarily through partners.  Working with over 200 partners in India alone, Xerox ensures that the partners are well equipped and strongly supported to win in the marketplace. Xerox has two types of partners – the Sales-only partners and the Sales & Service Partners (SSPs). All these partners are managed by Xerox Partner Business Managers who help the partners in expanding their business through business planning, sales planning, sales support and partner training.

Addressing customer issues on a real-time basis
Xerox has a centralized call centre for all direct customer contract, which is a standalone call centre for solving customer’s breakdown calls / queries where it caters to the entire production product, high-end A3 office product space along with warranty management for A4 office devices. Also, Xerox has an innovative system, which directly links customers to the engineers, who can then address the issues the customer is facing. Through this system, within a few minutes of the customer’s call, the engineer gets an SMS regarding the customer’s details as well as the problem. Xerox aligns its field workforce in such a way that the customers are mapped to a specific engineer who knows the operations and the fleet of this customer very well. This helps to build a long-term relationship with the customer and improve overall machine performance with improved uptime. In case of any repeated or unresolved problems, customers can escalate the problem to the Xerox “WE CARE” platform through a phone, email or web. A separate team, which is independent and directly works with Balaji Rajagopalan and the Managing Director of the company, works on this platform. This team, irrespective of any function, attends to the customer’s issues, responds to them, closely loops the issue in a timely manner and takes feedback from customers after the resolution of the problem.

Balaji Rajagopalan expressed his views, “An important element that we need to keep in mind that this involves an investment by the customer and he has many queries – both pre-purchase and post-sale. We provide multiple avenues to our customers so that they can get relevant information including toll-free numbers, web log and e-mail.”

Xerox’s Lean six sigma concept
Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a management concept that focusses on customer’s needs like no other process does. It is like how you can produce more with fewer defects. It is all about eliminating waste and improving the process. 6 sigma means that, in any process, one can have only 3.4 defects for every million output. Lean Six Sigma takes this concept forward to check each and everey work process and incorporates checks like the elimination of waste (non-value adds for customer) and reducing cycle time for products output, over and above reducing defects. It adds the vital dimension of speed and quality to the enterprise’s processes.

LSS work on DMAIC methodology (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control). Six Sigma has been around for a while, but Lean Six Sigma (LSS) as a concept emerged in India in 2002-03, and Xerox has been leading it in the industry to continuously improve on our service delivery to our customers and improving internal efficiencies.

Training partner engineers
The key thing which even comes before training is, hiring.  Xerox has a very clear well-defined method to hire engineers and it applies when we hire engineers for partners too. We concentrate not only to enhance skills of the partners, but we also look for the attitude of engineers. Since it is the engineers who will directly touch the base with the customers, the attitude of engineers becomes critical.  Besides training, Xerox has also Web-based and online “Eureka” tool, which is a worldwide knowledge base of over 150,000 engineers, for all the partners and Direct engineers. It is instituted in the Xerox system for over 20 years. Partners’ engineers going to remote areas of the country have direct access to the knowledge base of over 2 lakh engineers with them; they are not alone when faced with any particular problem. They are bound to solve the problem, faster than anybody in the system.

Another platform called “LogMeIn” is also there to help partners in providing second-level virtual technical assistance without the specialist visiting the remote location. In addition, Xerox has started the partner net portal giving partner the power of complete visibility of their machines in the field and all the knowledge base for providing remote resolution and training pack for providing training to both engineers and sales force.

satinder@varindia.com