Skoda India and Anarva

In my area of work big wins have long lead times and are often rare. Thrilled to have worked with SKODA India’s Director Zac Hollis and the SKODA India leadership team through a challenging assignment of transformation for customer centricity in a value luxury brand. It counts as one of my big, big wins, up there in the marquee with others over the years. (The sweetest one is way back in ’95-’96 when I eased the pain of a 3.5 year old child, but that’s a story for another day). It was a a collaborative effort all the way: with the India leadership team: Zac Hollis, Vibhu Hajela, Mansur Mohamed, Tarun Jha and Ajay Raghuvanshi. And to the Anarva team that always has my back: Bhawani Singh Shekhawat, Raj Dharmaraj, Rajashekar, Kaveri Suresh and Alka Puri who worked with me on the first assignment. Thank you! Onwards and upwards.

Zac Hollis: Director- Skoda Auto, India.

“I arrived in India at the end of 2018 with a clear task to get the Skoda India business ready for the launch of 2 new and important products, starting in 2021 with the Skoda Kushaq. In total 8,000 CR had been invested into India by Skoda auto. I quickly identified that a major issue was faced by the organization. Skoda had a reputation in the Indian market place of producing great cars but backed up by too few service centres, delivering a poor and expensive aftersales experience . On digging deeper this wasn’t just about making service affordable and accessible but there was a major culture change that had to take place. We had to fundamentally become a Customer Centric organization from the top of the organization down to the security guys at the dealership. What we named from Chairman to Doorman.

Devika supported myself and the Skoda management team in leading this cultural change program. She conducted a complete investigation of the brand positioning in the market place through workshops and stakeholder interviews and set about facilitating a program to overhaul the entire service experience. Her insight and her skills in facilitating enabled the organization to arrive at concrete actions that made real change to the customer experience throughout the ownership journey.

She also acted as a mentor for me during this process and her support was invaluable. The programs we rolled out from her work has changed the complete customer experience and was a significant contributor towards the brand increasing from 16th to 3rd in an internal customer satisfaction survey of Indian car manufacturers. Without her support I don’t believe such an improvement would have been possible and I can highly recommend her as a change management consultant and facilitator.”

Connect with us:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThinkAnarva
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/thinkanarva/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devikadevaiah/