Bowing to customer experience

Bangalore: Not many had heard of him till the spotlight pinned him down when Dell decided to route some tech support services back to the US.
Apart from being in the media glare for wrong reasons, the man who was handpicked by none other than Michael Dell to head Dell''s Indian BPO operations, is seen as the champion of "Customer Experience". He was Dell''s VP, Customer Experience, Americas, Texas.
An expat who has been away from India for more than 30 years, Mohan Kharbanda, 55, originally hails from Batinda, Punjab.Sources close to him reveal that he was wary of returning to India to head the BPO division. It was only on Michael Dell''s insistence did he deign to come.
Having come to India two years ago, Kharbanda has worked feverishly to build Dell''s global captive support center which is second only to GE''s in India. Based out of Bangalore, Dell support centre employs an estimated 4,000 people and is one of the companies that is rapidly expanding.
"..to survive, and ride the customer experience wave, companies will first need to recognise that ownership of the customer experience pervades their entire organisation," writes Kharbanda in a foreward he penned for the book, "Building Great Customer Experience" by Colin Shaw and John Ivens. Dell''s reported decision to shift part of the technical support to two of its product lines back to the US seems to be keeping in line with this philosophy on customer experience which has catapulted it into the top league.
The question on everyone''s mind, however, is, "will this set back the BPO clock in India?" "We do take strategic decisions like this when the customer is affected. These kind of decisions are the core of a good business strategy, anyway. And it is not as if one is shutting complete tech support from here," says Prakash Gurbaxani, CEO, Aditya-Birla owned TransWorks, a tech support company.
Amidst all this Mohan Kharbanda lies low - supposedly in an ashram meditating the chaos away and cannot be contacted at all. Sources reveal he is not supposed to talk to press mainly because of the earlier issue of Dell downsizing in the US while recruiting heavily in India.
The only sign of communication emerging from his office was an official 6-line statement saying Dell is committed to India and will continue to do so, without his name figuring anywhere.