Notebooks: Lapping Up the Points

Customer satisfaction on notebooks by and large remained intact with the exception of HP-Compaq going down a place and Lenovo escalating to the #2 spot. Dell was ahead of the pack when it came to overall product, and Lenovo took the pole position in the pre-sales and marketing parameters. Overall, customer satisfaction scores have come down with the exception of Lenovo, which saw a marginal growth as compared to last year. And this also explains its well deserved #2 position.

Over the last year, Dell significantly upped its ante on the services side and focused on creating more service networks in the country. According to sources at Dell: "In order to stay in the market, we need to focus aggressively on post-sales and to deliver more customer satisfaction we aggressively worked on ways and means to address customer issues once our products are sold. For instance, our service network has spread across 700 cities in India. Today, what makes us apart from the league is our on-site service support in most districts. Besides, the company also offers a complete damage cover for quite a few notebooks for a period of 1 year."

"Design is an important aspect of our customer strategy"

- P Krishnakumar, executive director, marketing, consumer, and SMB, Dell India and Mobility APJ

How did you manage to secure the top spot?

In the last one year, Dell was actively engaged in meeting customer satisfaction through various initiatives. Since we have to win customers and retain them, we have to make strategy through which we could be always be a favorite and emerge as the first choice during their buying decisions.

What has been Dell's customer strategy over the years?

Dell India has a 3-phase approach-pre-product, actual customer purchase experience, and post-purchase customer experience.

Pre-purchase experience pertains to our product development cycle. During this cycle, we look into different customer segments and try to design products based on the latest trends and customer needs. For customers who are style conscious, Dell has laptops in different variants available. For customers, who are always on-the-go, we have lightweight and thin notebooks like Dell XPS.

During the second stage, which involves purchase experience, we endeavor to meet customer requirements. We offer all kinds of purchase experiences either through retail outlets, online orders, multi-brand stores and exclusive stores, etc.

In the third phase, which is post-purchase, Dell's priority is always to address customer concerns related to warranty and service support. To address this issue, Dell offers all customers an on-site service support in most districts today.

How difficult is delivering customer satisfaction for a segment like notebooks?

Since I mentioned that design is an important aspect of our customer strategy, Dell India always tries to influence its global design team to understand Indian customer psyche and develop products based on local trends and requirements. It's always challenging to influence the global teams. But we have successfully done this, as you can see a variety of products meeting multiple customer expectations in the market. Secondly, we have multiple channels through which we reach out to our customers. Retail channel is one such. Training for retail partners was and is on our agenda. They need to be informed about the products. Unlike any other company, we trained our retail partners even in the upcountry markets. Third challenge is to pitch our products against different trends. We try to reach out to them through various channels and awareness campaigns such as TV and print advertisements.

Sweet Spot

Lenovo made it to the #2 spot and it was only a marginal separation in terms of overall scores with Dell. And it is really a worrying factor for Dell, which needs to aggressively fight it out with Lenovo in the coming years. Both Dell and Lenovo have huge product-depth oriented strategically across buying segments, which has clearly acted as a sweet spot for both of these vendors. The overall challenges HP's PC division faced seemed to have hurt its traction, and with HP coming back on the track with some innovative products in the last quarter will up its ante significantly in the ensuing year.

Tasks Ahead

As we look at other vendors in the fray, the ones like Acer, Sony, and Toshiba retained their respective places. But all these vendors' customer satisfaction scores dipped a bit as compared to the last year. As we look at vendors like Toshiba, there is a clear need to up their ante in customer satisfaction, as despite having some of the best notebook models it needs to become more proactive when it comes to competing with the likes of Dell and Lenovo. Also, vendors like Sony need to become more focused when it comes to enterprise mandates and need to clearly drive home its brand message for the enterprise audience.

As we look at last year, there was an evolutionary shift in mobile computing devices like notebooks, which focused on the form factor and tried to marry leading edge performance on devices that weighed less and at the same time does not compromise on functionality. Thanks to Intel pioneering its second-generation Core family of processors and advocating the 'ultrabook' concept that has all the trappings of a trend in the making. In OND 2011, all the vendors came out with an Ultrabook offering and vendors like Acer and ASUS took the lead and now all the vendors have an ultrabook offering. Going forward, HP's latest addition of Foilo range of ultrabooks might be a winner. Clearly, 2012 will be the year for form factor for notebook space and whoever offers a sub $1,000 ultrabook with features like high performance, ultra light, and long battery life will get the most of the enterprise slice.

The Ultrabooks have come at the right time for the notebook industry. With the rapid escalation of tablets, many in the industry felt that tablets will start denting into mainstream conventional notebooks space. But with Ultrabooks the buyers now have a clear choice. For instance Ultrabooks are full-fledged Notebooks that offer mainstream computing experience but weighs almost the same as Netbooks. Thanks to Intel's 2nd generation of Core family of processors and its Ultarbook specification that has created a new category in notebooks in the shortest time frame