What do you do at a service centre, especially if it is your smartphone you are getting serviced, so you don’t even have it around to fiddle with? Have you had to wait a while before someone attends to you? These, and some other “pain points” are what new-age service centres like Café Tresor, which services Apple products, claim to be working on.
The service centre has also deployed its own virtual assistant Alisha, developed fully in-house, to assist customers.
As you walk into the store, there’s an interactive screen where Alisha greets you, helps you register with your picture, email, phone number, and name. It then proceeds to register your service request and you wait while you are assigned a service executive.
The virtual assistant obviously stores your information, so it recognises you on your next visit to the service centre. “It is very liberating to talk to a machine,” Shaurya Seth, Managing Director, Tresor Systems, says. Alisha is helping Seth’s company figure out a customer’s journey at a service centre and the data this assistant gathers is being used by the company on the back-end for inventory planning, predictive analysis, etc.
An executive at Café Tresor told us that some ways in which this can be done is by observing a customer’s expressions (using store cameras) when they browse certain products on display at the service centre to figure out if it has interested them and whether they are potential buyers of such products.
The virtual assistant also helps with alerting the staff if a customer has waited for too long and the objective is to automate and make the waiting process for a customer easier.
Seth tells us that Alisha will find its way to all of the company’s service centres and that the company is looking at opening more spaces like Café Tresor. It currently has an outlet in Connaught Place in New Delhi, where it sees footfalls in the range of 30-40 people everyday.
Café Tresor also comes with its own co-working space. This is so that working professionals who take time off to get their devices serviced can continue working while they wait. “The target audience that we are addressing with Café Tresor are all corporate workers. We wanted to open up Café Tresor in corporate hubs,” Seth elaborates.
As the name suggests, the service centre will also have a café to make the waiting easier. Apart from this, it also showcases products from other brands as long as they don’t compete with Apple Products but rather, complement them — such as speakers, headsets, etc.
However, Alisha cannot be deployed at the Apple product stores that Tresor Systems runs because of brand guidelines. For now, the company is taking it one service centre at a time and might expand to other areas of New Delhi and maybe other cities.