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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 To succeed in the CE industry, companies must
Company Name innovate continually, maintain efficiency & operate
on a global basis. In order to do so, they typically
-LG deploy manufacturing facilities and sales offices
-India worldwide, in order to serve the local customers
more efficiently. Although, this type of expansion
-www.lg.com
is crucial in gaining a substantial market share, it
Industry can complicate business processes.

-Consumer Electronics The communication among the various sales offices

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.
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 LG INFRASTRUCTURE

Performance.

- Monitoring the daily issues and
immediately taken action on it and
resolve.
- Service bulletin
- Call Monitoring and Closure.
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
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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
LGCSNet Country Map
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.
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 1. Within Convenient 1 Hour time

slot assigning him of that job

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.