Western Digital (WD), a leading worldwide hard disk drive manufacturer, has announced the opening of its new service center in Egypt to cater to customers in North Africa.
WD will receive malfunctioning or defective drives through its authorized partners, validate the warranty terms and issue the RMA (Return Merchandize Authorization) number to the distributor, who in turn will get the credit or replacement drive as per RMA policy.
“The idea was to provide our customers a best-in-class value proposition in terms of after-sales service. Egypt, being the economic and technology nerve centre of the region, was a natural location for the service centre,” said Hafeez Khawaja, Senior Regional Director, Middle East, Africa and South Asia, WD.
“Having a local service center where customers can return malfunctioning drives for repair or replacement will serve to enhance customer confidence in WD and eliminate the need for such products to be shipped to Europe, Far East or Dubai, resulting in cost savings and reduced turnaround time in getting replacements,” Khawaja added.
The estimated turnaround time for product replacement, upon the product being received by WD, is less than a week. WD’s Cairo service center complements the one in Jebel Ali in Dubai. The new center will benefit those customers with data-sensitive applications who tend to be reluctant to ship malfunctioning drives out of the country, as WD will provide replacement within the country.
“WD is one of the largest hard disk drive suppliers in the world and covers over 90% of the storage needs of the IT industry. We are the market leader in Middle East and Africa, as revealed by the latest IDC (International Data Corporation) study, and we continue to consolidate our position through a combination of sustained investments in Research and Development and high quality service,” Khawaja said.
WD had in recent months introduced a number of new products to the Middle East and Africa market including My Book, the newest line of its external hard drive storage, and the USB 2.0 WD Passport Pocket Drives, a miniature digital storage device about the size of a matchbox and capable of holding as many as five 2-hour feature-length movies, 1,700 digital photos, 1,500 songs or thousands of documents. WD had also launched an upgraded version of WD Passport Portable USB Drives. With no need for a separate power supply, the 120 GB drive WD Passport Portable USB Drives are easy to use anywhere and are designed to serve as a digital file briefcase by enabling users to add instant extra storage.
