Broadband affordability and digital India are the key factors which fueled networking market in India. The brands are very much aggressive now to grab the huge upcoming opportunity across India. DIGISOL, the leading Indian brand has been catering the consumers need with high quality networking solutions at a very affordable price point. Arati Naik, COO, DIGISOL Systems Ltd interacted with DT recently for the next edition of Year Book. She revealed her opinion about the current market conditions and her upcoming channel plans.
DT: What have been the crucial milestones of your company during year 2017?
Ms. Arati: This year we celebrated one year of successfully launching our Structured Cabling business. We are very excited to see that over such a short period of time we have made tremendous in-roads in this highly competitive market. We are thankful to all our channel partners & SI customers who have believed in us & shown us confidence in DIGISOL SCS solutions. As we move into our 2nd year, we will continue to seek support & co-operation from our customers and channel partners who have shown their preference for DIGISOL SCS. We are committed to work closely with our partners and customers to provide them the best product and performance along with a good post-sales infrastructure.
DT: How do you support Government of India's 'Make-in-India' program?
Ms. Arati: We are one of the few companies who want to spearhead our government’s 'Make in India' and 'Digital India' initiative. We have been in the manufacturing sector for the last 25 years and have always contributed positively to the Indian economy by locally manufacturing products like the Routers, Modems, Networking Switches, Motherboards, Access points etc. Ours is one of the very few companies which continues to indigenously manufacture IT products in the country with substantial domestic value addition. If need arise, we are open to further investments and scaling up of our manufacturing setup at Goa to cater to larger manufacturing volume. We already expanded our manufacturing facility to include local manufacturing of our new passive range of products and nearly 90% of DIGISOL Passive Networking products are manufactured right here, in India.
DT: How GST changed your business affair in year 2017? What were your preparation to adopt this biggest tax reform?
Ms. Arati: GST has definitely modified our business model in terms of the way our logistics and supply chain works. Though it boasts of simplification, the compliance requirements have gone up many folds with the number of returns required to be filed each month. States with our sales offices have to be registered under GST and so is the compliance for these offices in terms of filing timely returns making payments.
Keeping abreast with the happenings under GST was the major step especially keeping the concerned personnel of the company as well as the business partners updated on the day to day changes. Thereafter making changes in the accounting structure and the required infrastructure for same.
DT: What's your channel strength currently in India? How do you plan to boost channel strength in year 2018?
Ms. Arati: Channel expansion within India is a continuous process. Spread across India, DIGISOL has 26 regional distributors, over 350 DIGISOL Connect Partners (Stockist Partners), over 200 DIGISOL Select Partners (System Integrators) and over 5000 DIGISOL Valued Partners (Resellers). We work closely with our channel partners and system integrators who value the power and quality of our products.
DT: How do you assure your customer excellent service support? What are your investment plans to enhance service support infrastructure to cover entire India?
Ms. Arati: DIGISOL has a Service & Support division under DIGICARE, which gives it a tremendous edge over its competitors. It offers high quality after sales service and support designed to deliver total customer satisfaction. DIGICARE has built one of the most efficient, skilled and highly professional service infrastructures in the country and provides end-to-end product support. DIGICARE has embarked on a journey of consolidation and improving customer experience through a new model of service network that offers faster turnaround of customer service. Through its easy-to-access DTAC call center and a wide network of Partners across the country, DIGICARE has implemented a lean and yet efficient service model where the defective products are over the counter swapped with good units at the customer touch points. This network is supported in the back-end by the state of the art Repair Hubs at Goa, which ensures the repair quality standards are maintained. With this new service management model. DIGICARE is all set to provide the best possible after sales support to DIGISOL and help make DIGISOL the most preferred product.
DT: What will be your key Go-To-Market Strategy for year 2018?
Ms. Arati: As a regular activity, this year also we will undertake events for our channel community, where we will be having one on one interaction with our channel partners. We also actively participate in the trade shows, expos, etc. Apart from these, we will also aggressively promote in-shop branding. We will regularly connect ourselves with our partners who have been selling our products through regular marketing updates and marketing brochures. We will invest considerably in training and empowering our channel partners to build their own technical expertise as well as enhance DIGISOL’s brand positioning and visibility in the industry.
We will come up with new offers and schemes every quarter. We offer, loyalty and incentive schemes to motivate the channel partners. There are two parts of profit: One is upfront margin on the sales and the second if they give a certain amount of business quarterly they get some extra incentive.
We have big focus and budget to promote DIGISOL brand on digital media and create customer pull in the market. With advent of Digitization, Mobility and Social media, the brand presence on digital media is a must. The presence on online channel increases the visibility of the products and some customers who see the product online call the offline stores for products. In other words, online visibility brings business to the traditional channel as well.
