Kunal Mahipal – CEO, Onsitego
No matter how pricey your phone is, it’s important to get it covered with an extended warranty and damage protection plan because most of the devices come with a one-year manufacturer’s warranty and are prone to damage and expensive to repair. An extended warranty plan usually starts immediately after the expiry of the manufacturer’s warranty and covers all the defects and malfunctions in order to make your mobile last longer. Onsitego is one such after-sales service platform offering extended warranty cover and damage protection plans for smartphones, tablets, laptops and other digital devices. Based in Mumbai and having a pan India presence, Onsitego assists people with hasslefree pick and drop services for repairing. To discuss more about the issue and services offered by the company, Ramesh Kumar Raja talked to Onsitego CEO Kunal Mahipal whose personal experience of receiving sub-par repair service led him to come up with a post-purchase service platform. Excerpts:
The trend of extended warranty on smartphones and other digital products is catching up in a big way. How do you look at it? Customers walking into a store or logging onto an online marketplace expect a lot more today than a few years ago. While right pricing and assortment are keys for any retailer to get footfall and web visits, there is a growing need for post-purchase repair and maintenance services.
Market expectations have evolved to a point where more and more people want a hassle-free experience of ownership. If something that’s an integral part of their lives breaks or stops working, they don’t want to run around for repairs and incur high costs.
How Onsitego is leveraging this development and what are your USPS in providing services? We are working with many brands/oems and retailers who want to drive greater value for their customers by providing the right range of after-sales services like extended warranty, damage protection plans, annual maintenance contracts (AMCS) and in-warranty services.
We have a unique ‘No Questions Asked’ policy, since we have a service-oriented model. Our acceptance rate is 99.4%, which is highest in our category. We don’t reject claims unless the customer
has happened to have bought the wrong protection plan.
Under our ‘Repair or Replacement’ policy, we give customers a free replacement device if we are not able to repair a device within the promised timeline.
We provide free pick and drop services for gadgets and at-home services for appliances, which means that the customer does not have to step out for repairs.
Also, over the last few years various segments of technologies were adopted with 4 goals in mind: reduction of process TATS in the service journey, driving
efficiency in the overall service delivery process, making the service delivery agents more productive by automation of full/parts of processes and enhancing the experience of the end customer. This has completely transformed the customer experience, and today we have one of the highest NPS scores in this industry.
Onsitego has tied up with both online and offline marketplaces as well as with some mobile companies. Can you please elaborate about your partnerships with them? We are serving a customer base of 4.5 million in India, and adding ~ 1.2 lakh customers on a monthly basis. Onsitego works in collaboration with some of the largest online and offline retailers in India like Croma, Vijay Sales, Tata Cliq, Amazon India and Ezone to name a few. Our plans are also available at regional specialty stores like Sanket, Great Eastern, Value Plus and Viveks. We have also extended our reach to smaller retailers through our partnership with leading consumer finance companies like ICICI, Axis, HDB and Kotak.
This year, we are expanding our services with brand warranty services for international marquee brands like Toshiba and Hamilton Beach. We have also recently launched new plans like AMC, or Annual Maintenance Contract for air conditioners and water purifiers, and assured buyback for smartphones.
What is the range and duration of plans you offer as extended warranty for smartphones? The maximum duration of extended warranty for smartphones is 1 year. The pricing varies from 6 to 8 per cent of the device price.
What measures does Onsitego take to ensure the quality of a device after being repaired and how has been the response so far? We have a stringent QC process which applies to all devices and appliances after being repaired. Devices that pass the test are sent to customers; and any Qc-failed device is sent back for repairing.
Which are the areas from where you receive maximum number of warranty requests? We get requests from all across the country, but most of the volume right now comes from metros and Tier I cities. If we talk about Tier II, tier III cities and rural areas, we are seeing a lot of traction from Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. We believe other states will follow the trend soon.
What are some of the challenges in the service business and how does Onsitego solve them? The repair request journey of the end customer is complex with the involvement of retail/acquisition partners and service partners. Apart from deep-rooted integration with our retail and service partners, we have also empowered the overall service operations by a number of automation engines and tools. For any repair journey, there are a large number of things which need to go right for the customer to have a good experience overall. Take any one of them out and the service delivery falters. With the help of technology, we have ensured that at all steps of repair journey, the allocation from 1 team to another and 1 owner to another is fast and real time, without any manual intervention.
There have been dozens of processes which have seen a transformation via automation, leading to a significant reduction in TAT. The most important of them all, was to empower the service delivery agents using technology. For example, a pick up executive would have to pick up the broken device and bring it to the regional office for data entry and verification, before dispatching it to the repair center. With the adoption of Livtrack mobile app for field executives, the data entry and validation happens on the go and an executive is empowered to deposit the device directly to the service centre, without bringing it to the regional office. This helped us in cutting red-tape and removing a significant lag in the logistics process. For smaller cities and towns, with no presence of field executives, Onsitego operations was empowered with a multi layered integration with various shipment partners. Not only is the shipment request created in a split second (from a potential 2-3 days), it also recommends the best shipment partner, based on performance history of partners and geography of the customers. ■
“For any repair journey, there are a large number of things which need to go right for the customer to have a good experience overall. Take any one of them out and the service delivery falters. With the help of technology, we have ensured that at all steps of repair journey, the allocation from 1 team to another and 1 owner to another is fast and real time, without any manual intervention”