What are some of the top priorities for Canon’s market engineering division, especially in the wake of COVID-19?
At Canon, we always try to offer robust service infrastructure through our Market Engineering service team. Our goal is to supply customers with innovative solutions and a superior level of service across the length and breadth of our country, across all product segments, at every opportunity. During these unprecedented times, our utmost priority has been to help our customers within the essential services with best in class service backed by the most recent innovations, thereby, enabling business continuity for them. Moreover, to safeguard the wellbeing of our customers, we have taken a bunch of preventive measures and are regularly engaging with them to help them in every way possible.
How do you see the market evolving in terms of demand for products and services?
In these testing times, when the whole world is going through a crisis, we are seeing consumers being extremely prudent while making any buying decision. While there has been a sway on the sales within the present situation, we strongly believe that going forward, consumers will invest in products and services with a compelling value proposition.
For Canon, with our diverse product portfolio and compelling service network, be it for B2B products or B2C products, we aim to persistently deliver value and delight to our customers. Hence, it is imperative for brands to reinvent their service mechanism and utilize the digital platforms efficiently at this point of time. In line with this, we have introduced the first ever service centric mobile applications along with the WhatsApp services, which understand and manage the diverse requirements of the customers. With our best in class service outreach backed by the latest innovations across all product segments, we will continue to strengthen our commitment towards ‘Customer Delight’.”
Please elaborate some of the initiatives that Canon India had taken from a customer service perspective during the lockdown phase.
At Canon India, service is an integral part of our everyday operations and the backbone of our legacy in the country. In the wake of COVID-19 we had to keep our service depot, and the center closed in line with the Government directives. However, for our customers falling under the category of essential service providers, our service team has gone ‘Above and Beyond’ to support the purchasers. We constantly provided consumables and on-site services to those customers through various means and methods. Our engineers provided remote support, we ensured toner delivery is done on time, and in many cases our engineers made site visits, taking all the prescribed precautions and permissions.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f9f9f9″]
“we strongly believe that going forward, consumers will invest in products and services with a compelling value proposition.”
Rahul Goel,
Senior Director, Market Engineering,
Canon India
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Once the lockdown is lifted, how many regions for Canon will be made operational from a service perspective?
Due to current situation of lockdown across our country, as of now there are 261 service center operational out of 273. Being a responsible corporate, we are consistently ensuring that our staff follow all the due precautions. Health and safety of our staff is paramount for us; hence we would be waiting for the next updated directives of the Government to resume our service network in the remaining regions. We at Canon believe in learning from even a crisis. Hence, we have picked up new ways of working and provide best possible services to our customers. A testimony to this is our two new mobile applications for customer service, Canon Care and Mobile CMP, and WhatsApp services. The new mobile applications endeavor to strengthen our prowess in delivering end to end customer support, thereby setting a benchmark in the service segment. WhatsApp services have been introduced to assist customers with their queries in languages like English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Bengali, especially during these difficult times when technology is playing a key role in keeping us connected. Customers can send their queries or raise service requests via WhatsApp on number +91 9108510853
What is will be Canon’s strategy to manage the customer service ecosystem post the Lockdown? Tell us about some of the new remote service proposition
In the current situation, we are awaiting the directives from the government to resume our entire service network. Our technical support team has already prepared an in-depth guide for post-lockdown management of the services on Canon products. These include several quality measures like engineer’s safety and merchandise sanitization. We have also prepared the desired advisory for customers for starting the machines after the lockdown period. We also are gazing inventory management of the spares and consumables which can be required to bring the machines back to optimized working levels
Moreover, as part of our persistent customer servicing efforts, we have been providing 24×7 assistance to customers through the new mobile applications and most widely used messenger service WhatsApp .It will help us to connect better with customers not only in metro cities but also in remote places across India. Servicing both B2B and B2C customers, the new mobile applications and WhatsApp service will provide a seamless experience making it the easiest and the most valuable source of customer connect with the organization. Canon Care mobile app, aims to help printer users, through features such as booking a service request, purchase cartridge and extended warranty, locating nearest service center and download software/drivers. They will also be able to track their request status and schedule an engineer visit if needed. Through Mobile CMP, Canon will be catering to the service requirements of B2B customers, by offering features like logging service call and view ticket history, toner request, view contract period, viewing machine life and request for contract renewal. Customers can also log service/toner requests and check for status on the existing queries. With 24×7 availability, customers can directly interact with us through WhatsApp and get a prompt response for their queries/service requests.
