With sales and services still restricted in many parts of the country, Havells India Limited, a leading Fast-Moving Electrical Goods (FMEG) and consumer durable company is extending warranty on all its products. Warranty on the products that has ended or is about to end between the lockdown period, i.e. March 22 to May 31, 2020, has now been extended till June 30, this year. This spans across all Havells products including air conditioners, water purifiers, washing machine, air cooler, geyser, fans and more.
Havells has taken this step to ease customer's worry, and is leveraging digital communication technique like WhatsApp to help customers register their complaints ensuring easy feasible solution. Havells product users can WhatsApp and chat with the representative for service request registration and other needs. Customers can also visit the Havells Consumer Connect / My Lloyd App for Service request registration and other customer needs. Apart from this, for easy access, they can also SMS for service request registration by sharing Pin code and the service required.
Due to lockdown, the field service engineers are unable to reach customer homes and provide the required services. However, the company is training them to follow some standard protocols once things start to open up. "Based on our philosophy of 'making a difference', Havells continues with its rigorous efforts to ensure trouble free livelihood of our customers and workers. To ensure that, we have defined SOPs for field service engineers including hygiene protocols. Our service engineers are trained for zero contact service which includes regular temperature test, everytime they arrive and leave. Follow contactless arrival, no touching of doorbells, sanitising all tools and even personal belongings. Sanitising the entire working area before starting the work, maintaining social distance at all times. We have trained our field engineers to provide solutions to our customer needs through various virtual tools including video call assisted self- service. Havells will do everything possible to adhere to the government's social distancing guidelines," says Saurabh Goel, President, Havells India Limited.
Havells is also solving standard service requests from customers with the help of 'Do It Yourself' tutorial videos. These videos have step by step illustrations for various products like AC cleaning, water purifier tank, filter cleaning and mixer grinder etc. for basic troubleshooting.
As the shops have started opening in the orange and green zone as per the MHA's recent directives, there is a pent up demand for certain products like fans, domestic appliances, grooming units. "It will be premature to asses the overall demand at this point, it will largely depend on how conditions attain normalcy. We hope, as a country, we are able to emerge from this the soonest. We look forward to a continued supportive and learning-based regulatory and policy framework," adds Goel.
Commenting on how the FMEG industry will be impacted, Goel adds, "From short-term perspective, the situation has significantly affected the peak summer sale and business normalcy. From long-term perspective, a CRISIL research report expects consumer durable demand to be declined by around 14-16 per cent in fiscal 2020, however, the impact in Q1 2020-21 will be much more at about 40 per cent YoY drop. We are closely monitoring the situation and hope that the industry would revive in the next few quarters."
Havells is in the process of resuming manufacturing. But before opening the plants, the company is adhering to certain sanitation protocols. Currently, many of Havells plants are starting to operate.