Growing with Partners: How Vivo is strengthening its Channel Base in India

An Interview with Vivo India | TelecomDrive.com

Chinese smartphone brand – Vivo entered the Indian market in late 2014 and since then, the company has been busy cementing its on-ground presence by developing a strong and escalating channel network that is well spread across the length and breadth of India.

Vivo is now looking forward to furthering increasing its relationships with the channel community and achieving greater heights.

Vivek Zhang, CMO, Vivo India interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the way Vivo is moving ahead to further spread its channel base in India.

Vivo is doing extremely good in terms of making its presence felt within the telecom channel community. What is the secret of your success here in India?

Vivo entered India in late 2014 and since then our strategy has been to strengthen our on-ground presence by developing a strong and escalating channel community. In the past three years, we have made sure that we tap on to our potential customer base present across 400 cities, in 22 states of India with the help of our channel partners.

Being ranked third in the Indian smartphone market with 14.56% market share is the result of the robust distribution network that Vivo has built in the past three years.

What is your strategy for deep engagement with the channel partners?

Regular engagement activities and training sessions with our channel partners across multiple states helps us establish a strong relationship and work together as a team. We believe that channel partner satisfaction is as important as customer satisfaction, and we have been happily achieving both.

We ensure that our channel partners are updated about all the latest offerings from Vivo by keeping the communication flow smooth. By the means of quality training sessions, we disseminate the latest market trends and enable our channel partners to stay updated.

How big is your channel network in India today?  What are your plans to expand this?

With increasing channel partners spread across 400 cities in India, we are aiming to further multiply the numbers as we move ahead in our journey.

The strong channel network has helped us grow manifolds in a country where existence of physical mobile stores is of great importance. Vivo makes sure that its channel partners are always motivated and perform enthusiastically by engaging with them on a regular basis.

A lot of channel partners try to move towards providing services and support around smartphones - how can Vivo help them?

For Vivo, providing service and support to the customers is supreme and it has been made possible with the help of channel partners we have been working with. Since 2014, our strategy in India has been to strengthen our offline presence and if we come across any potential service providers in our journey, we would be delighted to join hands.

As we plan to further amplify our reach in the country by tapping untouched regions, adding more channel partners would be a big leap. Going forward, we would be making more such partnerships with channel partners offering quality service and support.

What are some of the challenges that you face while expanding your channel reach in India?

India is one such market where a smartphone brand must have extensive offline presence to serve its potential customers. When we entered the Indian market 3 years back, we were definite about reaching out to potential customers by spreading our channel partner network across the country.

With over 400 service centers across 22 states in India, we have come a long way and further plan to multiple the number of channel partners in the future. While expanding our channel network we make sure that the partners and employees are provided with best possible training and information.