Xiaomi announced its 1,000th service center in Hyderabad on Wednesday claiming that it is now able to resolve 95 per cent of cases within 4 hour repair time. Xiaomi has service centers spread across more than 600 cities, and has emerged as the leader in after sales services for customers, the company said quoting date compiled by Red Quanta. The data is apparently based on interviews executed across 2,000 users of brands including Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo, OnePlus, Lenovo and Motorola, Lava and Huawei spread in 32 cities and towns of India by Red Quanta.

“At Xiaomi, our focus is on making innovation accessible to everyone. We make this happen by delivering best specs with high quality at an honest pricing. Therefore, we extend quality across all our pillars including customer service. As an internet company at heart, we continue to innovate across customer experience by offering efficient after sales solutions that promotes greater convenience and additional joy to our customers,” Manu Jain, vice president, Xiaomi and managing director, Xiaomi India said.

“After sales is one of the most important functions in Xiaomi and it is the second biggest workforce in our India team. With over 6,000 workforce contributing to the service network, we are building a strong network of dedicated employees who are focused on providing the best quality to our customers,” he added.

Xiaomi has introduced multiple initiatives to enhance its after sales services in India. The company runs an e-token system that allows customers to pre-book a visit to their nearest service centre on Mi.com or Mi Store app, “thereby experiencing a 72 per cent reduction in customer waiting time at the service centres.” The company also offers online tracking of their submitted device.

Xiaomi also has 500 authorised service centres for Mi TVs across India, the company said adding that it now offers TV installation e-services which allow customers to pre-book their TV installation timings.

After sales is a major deciding factor when someone is out buying a new smartphone or TV or for that matter, any other electronic device. Especially in India. It’s a little disappointing then that not many brands talk as openly about after sales as they should. And even when they do, real-world user cases are far from satisfactory. It’s nice to see Xiaomi, that recently became the number one smartphone brand in India, taking that extra step to ensure customers maintain their peace of mind while buying its products and services.

FIGHTING SCALPERS, RE-SELLERS WHO SELL XIAOMI PRODUCTS AT INFLATED PRICES
As it is serious about making its products available. Xiaomi had put up as many as 3 lakh units of the Redmi Note 5 Pro, during its first sale, and the phone was sold out in under three minutes. People in India, who’ve been following the trend and queuing up in lines on the internet — as well as offline — looking to buy a new Xiaomi phone, are quite familiar with the dynamics. Buying Xiaomi phones could be excruciating for buyers. Especially when there are (also) people who buy Xiaomi phones, not for themselves, but to sell them off, often at seemingly higher prices.

Instances of people buying its new phones and then selling them off at seemingly higher prices, on both online as well as offline platforms, aren’t new or surprising. Such people often entice potential buyers into buying these phones — at higher prices — on the subject of guaranteed availability. Something that isn’t guaranteed by Xiaomi itself in cases like the Redmi Note 5 Pro. In order to curb the unauthorised reselling of phones like the Redmi Note 5 Pro, Xiaomi recently announced, that it was temporarily halting the cash on delivery option for the upcoming sales of the Redmi Note 5 Pro on mi.com and Flipkart. But that’s not all. The company is aware of the scam that its hard to get phones often entail into, and is actively working to curb them.

“There are a few things that we’ve already done. Firstly, one user can buy only one product over a period of one month on Flipkart. Which means any kind of scalpers or re-sellers who were coming and trying to buy, they cannot buy. Even if they create a new account and we find that they’ve been using the same IP address, same password, same mobile number, we basically block their access,” Manu Jain had said recently while speaking with India Today Tech.

The company has been using machine learning to filter out scalpers who have been coming on Flipkart and Mi.com and Amazon and actively discouraging them.

Not just online, instances of authorised offline re-sellers, demanding higher prices in return for guaranteed availability are also fairly common these days. “We’re happy to cancel our working relationship with offline resellers who are seemingly selling our products at inflated cost. This is something that we don’t encourage and will not tolerate. If any of our authorised resellers are selling our products at a higher price and we come to know about it, we will cancel our contract. There were a few cases that came to our notice recently and we stopped working with them.”