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LGCSNet Success story of the web-based system for service partners
" We knew that we had to absolutely be at the top of customer satisfaction if we wanted to be successful.," Daya Prakash, CIO, LG Electronics India Pvt. Ltd.
ICT Integration in Business Jaypee Business School 12/16/2010
SUCCEED IN THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY
AT A GLANCE Company Name -LG -India -www.lg.com
Industry
-Consumer Electronics Qualitative Benefits - Call Tracking and Open / Pending complaints reports. - Reduce response time due to regular call monitoring. - Update daily call status and action taken accordingly. - Direct contact with the customers through happy calling to get the feedback. - Daily call registration and call assign to engineers.
To succeed in the CE industry, companies must innovate continually, maintain efficiency & operate on a global basis. In order to do so, they typically deploy manufacturing facilities and sales offices worldwide, in order to serve the local customers more efficiently. Although, this type of expansion is crucial in gaining a substantial market share, it can complicate business processes. The communication among the various sales offices with their parent office is indeed very crucial in order to work both, effectively and efficiently. LG, dealing in a variety of products like washing machine, television, microwave oven, mobile phones and so on, faced such a challenge. LGEIL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of LG Electronics, South Korea, set up base 12 years ago. It set up its manufacturing hub in India in April 1998 with a turnover of 31 million USD. During the years 1998-2004 demand increased manifold and earlier third party manufacturing base was used by the organization which had various tax and duty benefits. But with increase in demand, Indian and abroad in 2004 domestic plant in Pune was setup.
- Improvement in Productivity and Quality of Service. - Improvement in ASC Performance. - Monitoring the daily issues and immediately taken action on it and resolve. - Service bulletin
LG INFRASTRUCTURE Currently in 2010, it has 48 branch offices across 9 regions across the country. Each branch is required office to reach customers directly through remote area offices area office in charge, to talk to trading partners, 2300 direct distributors and then sub
- Call Monitoring and Closure. 2
Quantitative Benefits - Over 90% calls are being registered through LGCSNet. - System used by over 1000 ASC across product categories. - 5 Lac (approx)calls in a month with absolute transparency. - 10-20% increased accuracy for spare inventory management at ASC - Effective Spare Part Inventory Management amounting to an inventory worth Rs 14 crores. - 100% of Spares parts orders are being routed through System only. -
To support VOC and 211 program by 120 Telecallers, making about 1.5 lakh calls a month.
The result of the same is Customer Satisfaction. LGCSNet sites
Call center- 2,533 sites North India- 585 sites South India- 907 sites Server host- SOFTCELLNET
dealers’ three distribution centres in place. As the demand is growing the challenge is how to give unique perspective to customers in order to provide more than value for money. The aim has been to provide a unique experience to customers. With this idea in place, LG owned shops were established, in order to educate the customers on core technical products. Thus, helping them to rightly appreciate the product and better understand the technicalities related to it. With Direct Service Centres (30 in non-metro and tier 2 cities) the aim is to monitor the whole experience and to ensure that the customers are exposed to better service experience.
IT@ LG
In these changing scenarios it is of paramount importance for the organizations is to act fast with the right decisions. Organizations today need to have their ERP foundations in place. LG incorporates it through e-management system that integrates various business functions. All the modules of the ERP Package were configured wither prior customisation to a few i.e. approx 30% customisation.
LGCSNet Country Map PROVIDING EMPLOYEES WITH NEEDED INFORMATION
There was plenty of substantial information at too many places, and it was not organized in ways that enabled employees to find it. Anytime, anyone had any information to share, it would be communicated manually. 8748 service engineers
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and 1124 service centers were too widespread to be collaborated with the help of current ERP package. This resulted in redundancies and no single ownership of information.
THE NEED FOR REAL-TIME INFORMATION
It is very difficult for any organization to attract 100% potential customers and engage their demand. Therefore, if an organization has a satisfied customer then there is a huge scope of repeat purchase by customers and new products can be offered through cross selling etc. But, a company cannot leverage advantages in product performance and adaptability unless it has the availability of real-time information to determine costs, assess business performance, and identify ways of benefiting from economies of scale across geographically widespread operations. LGEIL has several Authorised Service Center’s (ASC) spread across India. Every ASC has a demand requirement for LG products as per the consumption by the customer. Their demand requirement has to be very transparent in order to avoid building up of inventory and/or excess lead time. Thus, the real time update was required for efficient servicing of the customers. Every ASC was given the access to the Customer Service Online Support network (www.lgcsnet.com), wherein they could enter their demand and/or other relevant details concerning customer service. The moment of truth had to be pleasant, consistent and convenient to the customer. For instance, XYZ engineer visits a customer & if he behaves courteously, the moment of truth is pleasant. The second time ABC engineer visits the same customer. This is inconvenient for the customer as s/he shall have to repeat about the encounter at the first time service. Thus, the information regarding which customer was visited by which engineer is recorded. ”To survive in the fierce and stiff competition, management of speed with right decision ahead of competitors is critical. I am of the opinion that IT dept plays a crucial role in leading the company into the new height of execution with enhanced speed by providing delicate decision making tools and processes”- MD, LGEIL
LGCSNET
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The B2B portal was meant to help LGEIL's service franchisees (ASCs) maintain spare part stock, even if they were located in the backwaters. According to Mr. Prakash, the LG Market depended on the service center’s attitude towards the customer. With reliable and good service quality LG provided a unique customer solution where in ERP system service centers infrastructure challenge was catered by a platform accessed by the 100 service centers and integrated through LG. The data was gathered from the CSNet module & subsequently, fed into the CRM module of the ERP package. This also enabled them to gain control over the service levels of the service engineers spread across the country. LGCSNet was a control mechanism that lay down the guidelines for behaviour, service efficiency and communication skills of service engineers. Also, it updated the management with the real-time requirements/ information of the ASCs. The LGCSNet was launched with a campaign called “Customer Delight”. There were three initiatives associated with this system- SMS Service, 211 & Voice of Customer .
SMS Service
211
Customer calls call center
2. Call Back to Customer in 2 hours
SMS sent to customer with job code
1. Service Engineer visit in 1 Day
SMS sent to service engineer slot assigning him of that job
1. Within Convenient 1 Hour time
Simultaneous SMS to branch office
With this platform there was a 50-60% increase in sales potential. Long term benefits are being sought after with it. Thus, it has been of a paramount importance to the company and its business.
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