Helping a Europe based Product Company and its US partner who are market leaders in the area of electronic pricing solutions for the retailers. The company has a very efficient partner network, which accounts for more than sixty percent of its sales.

Business Problem
The product company wanted to make its presence felt in the US market. This was the first foray of the company into North America and that too with a new line of product. To achieve its short term and long term objective, it partnered with a US company which had an established sales network through out the US. What was lacking was the product support network. Moreover, the client wanted to set up the sales network along with the support network within a span of 2 months.

The Solution
Appulse stepped in to help the European product company establish a support network simultaneously with the sales network in the US. Appulse deployed its product support framework to understand client’s specific business requirements and completed this task within a week. Appulse collaborated with the US sales partner in establishing the product deployment environment, POS software/hardware environment, printers etc. at the end customers locations.

The next task was to impart training to the US sales partner on the do’ and don’ts of providing the basic support. This helped in considerable improvement in turnaround time. This was possible due to intensive delivery planning exercises that mitigated the effects of glitches in hardware support and platforms availability that the team faced during the course of the implementation.

Appulse engineers worked in close collaboration with the installation team of the product company in the US for the first 3 deployments in retail stores. This team worked closely with offshore team for sorting out deployment issues at the site of installation. The offshore team support was round the clock. The offshore team created support and installation documents to be used by the team in the US.

The product support was divided into 2 areas, first was Proactive Monitoring and the second technical support of level 2.For both the support areas daily reports were generated and shared with our client.

Proactive monitoring involved monitoring the product server, Data base server, hardware (POS) and also log monitoring. Other responsibilities include studying application behavior and tracking system performance. Resolution of any problem was done immediately and the US sales partner was informed accordingly.

Technical support of level 2 was provided around the clock. The US sales partner was regularly interacting with the actual customer. All issues and problems were conveyed to Appulse through the sales partners and they were resolved with high priority. The service level agreements (SLA) for resolutions were extremely tight.

Benefits
This initiative of the product company in the US came out to be highly successful, as the product company was able to meet all its commitment and in turn got a strong foot hold in the US market. Some of the benefits the client realized included: The client was able to work with a single support partner for such myriad support tasks, maintaining high level of efficiency and quality levels high. Appulse provided 24 X 7support which helped client in reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and which satisfied the retailers due to proactive monitoring.

The Appulse team created and delivered a series of support based tasks at a fractional cost of US actual rates. Thanks to the offshore-based sustenance model placed by Appulse, which dramatically reduced the client's Total Cost of Operations (TCO).