Smartbars for smartphone repair: B2X is rolling out a new one every two days in India

A dead battery, a cloudy screen, or a displaced earphone jack, and suddenly that shiny new smartphone stares blankly at you. That’s when you feel grateful for choosing a manufacturer who has a good customer support network in place – or despair at not having done so.

Fixing a smartphone is not like changing a lightbulb. Most warranties require us not to open up the gadget even if we feel courageous enough to replace a part ourselves. That’s why most buyers want to know what kind of servicing will be available if something goes wrong.

India has seen a smartphone boom in recent years, and manufacturers from Korea, China, Europe, and the US are in a race to push their smartphones into the hands of millions. The challenge is what comes later: providing customer care across a large country.

Munich-based B2X, a global customer care provider for smarphones of multiple brands, saw the opportunity in this and made its move in India late last year, buying a majority stake in The Service Solutions (TSS), an Apple authorised service provider. In addition to rebranding the existing service centers, it started rolling out multi-brand B2X Smartbars, currently servicing Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Yotaphone. “Many more are in the on-boarding or contract-signing stage,” Sreevathsa Prabhakar, MD of B2X India tells Tech in Asia.

Since the acquisition of TSS last October, it has doubled the number of mono-brand exclusive centers to 27, and added on 55 multi-brand Smartbars across 50 Indian cities. Twenty more are in various stages of completion and will be ready in April. “We are rolling out Smartbars at the rate of almost one every two days,” says Prabhakar.

World’s fastest growing smartphone market

That’s in step with India’s smartphone growth rate, which is the fastest in the world with an 82 percent rise in shipments from 2013 to 2014. By the end of the year, India is projected to have 212 million smartphones. Next year, it will go past the US to become the world’s second largest smartphone market, after China.

B2X aims to use technology to transform the traditional service ecosystem. “Our proprietary Aftersales Management Software (AMS) enables us to expand our Smartbar network quickly. With AMS, we can also manage the performance of our service centers in real-time so that we can respond to any escalations proactively,” says Prabhakar.

India has a ‘jugaad’ mindset, which is to find simple hacks to everyday problems. But with smartphones getting more complex by the day, maybe customers will appreciate a more German-style systems-oriented approach.

See: Smartphone shootout in India: Xiaomi Mi4 goes head-to-head with OnePlus One