When you’re the world’s leading remanufacturer of toner cartridges, such a designation can cast a large shadow over other product and service capabilities within your catalog. Clover Imaging Group isn’t in need of an AmEx or other calling cards to garner recognition in the ecosystem of remanufactured toner cartridges and supplies. But the global giant (which falls under the umbrella of Clover Technologies Group) felt its wealth of offerings in marketing, print management and technical support could benefit tremendously from enhanced exposure to the dealer and OEM community.
Thus, when ITEX 2018 rolled around last May, it served as the official coming-out party for Clover Services Group. According to Luke Goldberg, the executive vice president of global sales and marketing for Clover Imaging Group, creating the stand-alone division helps to differentiate Clover Services in the minds of customers while crafting a cohesive marketing message to the industry regarding its commitment to helping customers grow. In Clover Services, Goldberg believes his team has assembled the most diverse and wide-ranging third-party line of solutions that has ever been assembled in the marketplace.
Luke Goldberg
“Clover has endeavored to build out the most comprehensive services-and-solutions portfolio for our customers and value-added resellers, whether they’re independent dealers, OEMs—whatever channel they reside in—so that we can add value and help our customers grow beyond just our capabilities in collections and remanufacturing,” said Goldberg. “That’s a new direction we started in earnest during the last number of years, building out that services-and-solutions portfolio to help support our customers to help keep them vibrant, profitable and sustainable for years to come.”
The global parent Clover Technologies Group (CTG) is a billion-dollar operation that operates in 60 countries, with five manufacturing plants in Mexicali, Baja California (which serves the U.S. market); Serbia; Vietnam; Brazil and Ithaca, MI (an inkjet facility). Both Goldberg and Clover Imaging Group are viewed as thought leaders on the subject of remanufactured cartridges and legal ramifications surrounding new-builds and other possible patent-infringing manufacturing practices.
The Clover Services Group division is designed to cast more light on each of the three service-based sectors within the organization’s toolbox. These services are:
Amplify
The custom content digital marketing services arm of Clover Services, Amplify enables dealers and resellers to better position their own product and service dossiers through online content that enables them to engage a target audience with original and relevant content. These assets can take the form of blogs, videos, white papers and position papers—all content specifically crafted for the dealer, sans recycled material.
On a more granular level, the content is verticalized for dealers and aimed at attracting specific personas within a given organization, such as a health care CEO or a legal CFO who the dealership seeks to target. “Ultimately, we want to help that dealer convert website visitors to leads, and to nurture those leads from consideration to conversion. And ultimately, we seek to create brand advocates,” said Goldberg.
Luke Goldberg
What drives the Clover Services value proposition in this area is its hundreds of years of collective experience in the imaging space, which provides the grounding for the tailored content. A digital marketing firm, particularly in a large city, might charge a premium over the Amplify rates and not boast the same level of understanding of the dealer’s business. That might require months for the firm to get up to speed.
Amplify can be leveraged based on the needs of the client, with or without a recurring commitment. Goldberg points out that dealers can select a blog package of six or 12 per month as a recurring service, or embark on a full-bore website redesign as a one-off project. Or the dealer could seek help in building personas for social media channels.
Ultimately, we want to help that dealer convert website visitors to leads, and to nurture those leads from consideration to conversion. And ultimately, we seek to create brand advocates.
Luke Goldberg
Axess Professional Services
Goldberg views Axess as the tonic to treat the rash of ineffectual managed print services that focus primarily on device management. Axess aims to provide the full gamut of true MPS, including the services, software, training and support that manage the entire life cycle of the document, through scanning, capture, workflow BPO and archiving. It includes data collection agent tools from Print Fleet and FMAudit, user management tools from Print Audit that address user behavior and rules, along with document management solutions. One of the newer areas Axess is developing is archiving and scanning solutions for the legal vertical.
Axess is a full-suite approach to the training, monitoring, and management of MPS to the dealer’s customer base.
“We encapsulate all that knowledge through the software side to the training side,” Goldberg noted. “We go in and vet ourselves with dealers, and we train their teams and help create print policies. We help them undergo that evolution between simple device management to user management, then finally to document management. Everything we’re doing is to facilitate the dealer becoming stickier with their customer and adding more value, ultimately to de-commoditize the page.”
TechLink 2.0
The third pillar of the Clover Services foundation is the service and training elements for the imaging space. TechLink offers service training for A4 devices, as the dealer universe (especially the BTA channel) is highly adept at servicing A3 hardware. The A4 training is provided either on-site or via webinar.
A subset of TechLink is its troubleshooting and triage training to help dealers become more proficient in first-call effectiveness, the hallmark of quality service that can mitigate service costs by ferreting out issues over the phone. “A new aspect of TechLink is not only doing the training on the printer service and repair, it’s training to triage and troubleshoot in advance, so maybe they don’t have to dispatch a technical person,” Goldberg said, noting that Clover also can white label the entire technical service interface for both for dealers and OEMs, handling the help desk engagement.
TechLink also offers dispatch and service functions which can fortify dealers who don’t have technicians in a specific region, enabling them to meet service-level agreements on a national basis. Clover Services Group has also partnered with BoxScore to provide a real-time scoring and feedback tool on service dispatches. BoxScore sends out a brief qualitative and quantitative questionnaire to dealer clients, and the answers provide dealers with critical feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of their service component.
Goldberg notes that Clover is constantly on the lookout for new services, content, programs and software that can help flesh out each of the three pillars, including a new document management tool that was in the works as of press time. He wouldn’t rule out adding a fourth pillar in the future that addresses other aspects of a dealer’s business.
“If we cover those three pillars, we go a long ways toward solving the dealers’ pain points, honing in on them and creating new revenue opportunities as we overcome their issues,” he said.
Moving Toward XaaS
Clover Services Group speaks to the movement toward offering Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS), and Goldberg feels dealers must continue down the path of becoming more service-oriented providers to forge those long-term, sticky relationships with end clients.
“In terms of Everything-as-a-Service, we want to engender that in the imaging space as well, transcend the multiple decimal points surrounding the cost and help our dealers be more viewed as full-blown services and solutions providers versus just print providers. We’re going to facilitate those transitions. Print still might be a central aspect, but certainly it will not be the only aspect of the overall value proposition”, said Goldberg.
The ITEX 2018 debut was just one stop in the Clover Services marketing campaign, and Clover has plans for a strong presence at dealer groups and OEM events. A core group of Clover Services Group sales reps are tasked with creating a funnel to ensure they are getting in front of the right dealers and groups, and the marketing team is focused on bringing to light what Goldberg believes is an unprecedented collection of services to the dealer market.
Everything we’re doing is to facilitate the dealer becoming stickier with their customer and adding more value, ultimately to de-commoditize the page.
While Clover’s services can act as a complement to the toner cartridge and parts side of the Clover menu, driving revenue for both (with dealers who buy both reaping service discounts), Goldberg is also looking to entice clients who don’t have a need for their A4 cartridges and parts. In fact, one of the measures for Clover’s stand-alone global services is tied into helping dealer customers sell anything in their portfolio by building a standout marketing program for them. In other words, dealers don’t need to buy Clover’s toner in order to take advantage of the Clover Services Group world of service components.
“We’re only two months in, but the response has been great,” he said. “To this day, we still get a lot of ‘I didn’t know you guys did that’ remarks. Hopefully, a year from now, the Clover Services Group visibility will be even greater. Clover just isn’t the biggest, most-technically-capable manufacturer and reverse-logistics provider in the industry. We have the most comprehensive and highest-quality suite of services and solutions that anyone has, all aimed at driving mutual growth. This is one of the best-kept secrets in the industry, and we’re trying to let the cat out of the bag.”
