Let us for a moment imagine that you are heading the operations of a bank that represents the face of shining India. It’s peak business time and given the hyperactive Sensex, you are experiencing heavy transactions. Suddenly, the bank’s servers fail, and before you decipher, the personnel managing your network inform you that the breakdown is technical and major and that it would take four hours to fix it.

Given the colossal loss in business that you are staring at, you despise this curt observation.You lash out at the network service provider and even think on the lines of replacing it at the first go. However if Sunanda Das’ words are to be believed, it works to the contrary. Das, Managing Director of Cable & Wireless India says that such honest observation in the face of technical breakdowns has helped the company he heads garner trust which could never have come about had they not spelt out ‘four hours’ in such situations.

“Customers do get very agitated at that instant, but later, they appreciate our openness for it helps them work out a plan and remain critical in case something similar were to happen in future,” he says.

Right time with right focus
Cable & Wireless has used the trust factor, and thereby the ‘quality of service’ peg to win over some big customers in India in the past year. The network services provider, credited with being the first company to lay a trans-Atlantic submarine cable system, has been present in India for the past 12 years. However its presence was limited to a support center that it ran for its managed network and security services supporting global customers, and its limited services to Indian customers. The new management of the company began looking at India as a key market around two years ago. Then onwards, the nearly 150 year old Cable & Wireless has focused on building a name in the Indian market.

However given the fact that the BPO boom had already happened and companies had invested in their telecom infrastructure, wasn’t the company a couple of years too late to think of addressing the Indian market? After all, had it done the same a little earlier, it might have been able to win a lot more customers.