The new mantra at Voltas

"In today's market, if we cannot satisfy the customer we might as well not be in business". This is the philosophy of Nawshir Khurody, managing director of Voltas, the engineering and air-conditioning major. He is using this philosophy of customer satisfaction to usher in a change at the, otherwise, staid company.

The last few years have been very rough for Voltas. The company has been undergoing a restructuring process to get a focus on core competencies, which, the management felt, lay in the engineering goods and air-conditioners business. The company undertook several internal restructuring measures, like hiving off of the white goods business, cost cutting steps like closing down a number of branch offices all over the country and offering a voluntary retirement scheme to 1,700 staff members.

These measures were followed by the launch of 44 models of air-conditioners and customer-friendly financing schemes. However, the revamp and reoriented focus did not help the company much, as its sales stayed sluggish, thus helping rival Carrier Aircon to maintain its dominance in terms of market share. The management realized the gravity of the situation in the market place and launched a serious attempt to rectify this situation. The philosophy of 'customer satisfaction' became the fountainhead of this strategy.

The focus for the moment, however, is on the unitary products air-conditioning business which caters to the household segment. Company officials say that while the industrial air-conditioners business continues to perform satisfactorily, the unitary products business catering to the consumer segment is causing concern.

Officials say that the unitary air-conditioners manufacturing plant located as it is at Dadra was the cause of the problem. This Union Territory, which is a six-hour drive from Mumbai, suffers from a perennial telecommunications problem. The public telecom network being highly unreliable was the main bottleneck as far as sales are concerned.

Voltas also conducted an internal study, which revealed that the non-existent customer response department in the company, shoddy delivery and installation schedules, had virtually paved the way for it to lose almost 16,000 potential customers for various reasons—dissatisfaction with company response, non-availability of machines and inaccessibility of sales people. In other words, there was no customer service at all.