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ShareNew Delhi: As part of a strategic shift towards services, India's largest mobile handset brand Nokia has completed overhauling its customer care network.
The company, which unveiled a new format of its service centre in Mumbai on Wednesday, said it has completed transferring all its 800 service outlets to itself from distributors Brightpoint and HCL Infosystems.
Sudhir Kohli, customer care head, Nokia India, said, "We completed the takeover of franchisees from HCL and Brightpoint towards the end of the first half of the year and will convert some of the existing service outlets into the new model."
In keeping with the hybrid hardware, software and services approach laid out for its future growth, the company plans to redesign its customer care outlets into 'experience centres'. Core to the new format, expected to be unrolled in all the six metros over the next three quarters, will be dedicated learning sections for new customers of Nokia's software and services such as music downloads and gaming.
In anticipation of the overhaul, Nokia in 2007 had announced it was taking over its customer care operations from its two main distributors HCL Info and Brightpoint. It also decided to take away HCL Info's status as the exclusive distributor of its GSM handsets. The duo, however, will run two of the four zonal handset repairing centres of Nokia with a capacity of 40,000 phones each per month, Kohli said.
He added the company has nearly doubled its customer care centres to 800 over the last 12 months, but the pace of expansion will drop slightly in the coming months due to saturation. "Since taking over the outlets directly, we have managed to bring down the average time for high-level repairing to around 5 days for metros and 10-12 days for rural areas," he added.
He said the company has also placed nearly 40,000 handsets at the service centres to be provided as back-up phones to customers who give their phones for repairing.
