“As a Responsible Brand, Customer Relationships Come First for Western Digital”

“As a Responsible Brand, Customer Relationships Come First for Western Digital”

With a huge growth in data consumption across all verticals, storage solution has also innovated themselves to serve customers need along with high performance commitment.   Western Digital, the undisputed leader in the Indian market, has enjoyed this evolution by offering innovative & updated storage solutions to all set of customers. To know more about company's 2020 plan, Telecom Today interacted with Jaganathan Chelliah, Director – Marketing, Western Digital, India.

Q: How do you see the overall adoption of SSD storage in 2020?

A: SSD adoption today is happening at a very fast pace when it comes to both client storage and consumer storage. There has been tremendous growth among client storage devices as today if you look at most of the high-end laptops, almost all of them are built on an internal SSD. The factors that are driving this adoption in the internal storage space is primarily performance and the ability to create sleek-form factors using SSDs. Due to high rate of data generation per day among enterprise, capacity of storage is getting fulfilled with traditional storage solutions and that will continue to grow. To have cost effective and performance driven storage demand among enterprise, we see a clear case of enterprise class and SSD happening.

Q: How do you cater to demand of SSDs among different Indian customer segments?

A: We have a very strong line-up for both internal and external SSDs. At the high-end, we have WD Black SSD portfolio which is ideally suitable for professional gamers. For main stream users, we have WD Blue portfolio whereas at entry level we have the WD Green SSD portfolio. We have fairly well-defined SSDs portfolio to address the emerging demands in the market.

Q: How do you see the growth of gaming market in India?

A: Gaming market is growing at good pace currently. The most important requirement right now is education and experience. So, Western Digital provides the right experience to the budding community in India. We keep on engaging with the gaming community particularly in the metros. We participated in the all major gaming events over the past 12 months and this year also we have big plans for all major shows in India. Additionally, we will also boost our engagement with System Integrators who are building gaming PCs.

Q: How do you see the positioning of SanDisk brand?

A: SanDisk is predominantly a consumer storage brand and we enjoy number one position in this segment since long time. As per the latest CMR report, SanDisk brand commands more than 60% market share in all categories put together. We started off with camera category and today we are present in cameras, USBs, microSD cards and across all these segments so we are the market leaders.

Q: What will be your key marketing strategy for the channel partners in year 2020?

A: Channel plays a very important role for us to succeed in the Indian market. Western Digital has a three-prompt strategy as far as channel engagement is concerned. Relationship comes first, we will strongly value our relationship with channel partners. Motivation, we firmly believe that the loyal channel partners need to be rewarded appropriately and education to ensure that the channels is regularly updated with latest technology so that they actually benefit from positioning the technology in a right manner to the customers and making it a profitable business. We work on these three aspects and we have a very comprehensive programme that addresses these three pillars.

Q: How do you take care of Service Support for your loyal customers base?   

A: As a responsible brand, customer relationships come first for Western Digital. We offer decent geographical coverage and a world-class service team which is available six days a week from 8 AM to 6 PM. To ensure seamless after-sales service, we further provide our customers with 75 service locations across India which include 50 drop-in counters and 25 new Over The Counter (OTC) replacement Centers. Additionally, we also provide free pick-up and drop facility within a given timeframe, which must comply with our DoA policy.

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