Service First for Allen Business Machines Since 1953

Every business owner strives to do more with less, increasing sales while paring back overhead. That’s difficult to do without stressing out employees or cutting quality of service. Office equipment dealer Allen Business Machines (ABM) has found a way to raise its service business productivity with the enthusiastic support of its technicians. Today, ABM is handling about 5 million more copies than it was 10 years ago while going from 10 to six technicians and maintaining a two-hour response time.

Dan Maucher

President and owner Dan Maucher attributes this achievement to a service-oriented company culture that began when his father Elmer started the company in 1953. “Dad always made a special effort toward the service side of the business, making sure that customers were responded to and taken care of,” said Maucher. “He didn’t like getting calls from customers that something wasn’t right. Even though he was a very nice guy, that was one thing that could really, really tick him off. I was brought up to very much respect the service side of the business.” That dedication to customer service is what earned ABM the BEI and ENX Magazine Office Technology Service Excellence Platinum Award.

“My father actually bought a small dealership. He was in the Navy during World War II and the Korean conflict,” said Maucher. “He served on a repair ship, and they taught him the trade of repairing office equipment.” Elmer Maucher didn’t get much for the $600 he borrowed from an uncle to buy the business: some furniture, parts, and tools.

Greg Wilbanks

“All of our service people, from our parts manager to our billing clerk, they actually care about our customers,” said Greg Wilbanks, service manager at ABM. “Our service techs know our customers by name.” He noted that a smaller family owned company can resolve problems quickly, and ABM has empowered its employees to escalate whatever they need to. “If they find any kind of an issue out there in the field, they can immediately come to me or go to Phil, Dan or whichever department head they need.”

Today, ABM is a $6 million‑a‑year company serving a 100-mile radius of the Fort Wayne, Indiana area. Its main lines are sales and servicing of Sharp copiers and Kyocera printers. Schools and churches represent about 40 percent of ABM’s business. The company added office furniture and supplies about 10 years ago when sales for product lines like typewriters, calculators, and cash registers were declining. “Believe it or not, we’re still servicing typewriters for our customers,” said Maucher.

Phil Koehl

ABM recently launched a managed services division using the Continuum platform. “Our copier revenue is growing marginally,” said Phil Koehl, controller at ABM. “Managed network services is probably going to have the biggest growth potential, though it’s been a slow start. It’s an area we really want to grow, and at some point it will probably overtake the copier business.”

“The amount that’s going to get printed will continue to decrease,” said Phil. “That was one of the driving factors for us to get involved with managed network services. It kind of offset the falling page output. It’s going to get tougher in that arena.”

Whether in core or new business lines, growth for ABM will depend on the quality of the service it provides. “I started in the business back in 1980. The rule of thumb back then was you made money in your hardware and your supplies. If we could break even in service, we were doing well,” said Maucher. “Now it’s totally the opposite. With margins being compressed as everybody goes after each other, if you can make a little bit on the hardware and the supply, OK. Your money is made in service now.”

“Our service techs are our frontline,” said Wilbanks. “They see our customers more than anyone. Our customers will talk to them more. They can get inside information that a sales guy just can’t do, because the sales guy talks to them maybe once or twice a year. A service tech speaks with them all the time.”

ABM’s service team is also a source for business leads. When they can, they drop off brochures at neighboring businesses. This is one way that ABM is getting the word out about its new managed network service program. “A lot of people don’t know we’re doing that,” said Wilbanks. “We’re using our service techs to educate our customers on what we do. It’s going to be a big help.” Service techs can earn lead fees of between $20 and $150.

Wilbanks said the biggest challenge for his techs is keeping up with the changes in technology. “What a service tech does today is not anywhere near what it was 10 years ago. The service techs have to know so much more about IT work than they had to know before,” he said. “That’s been a challenge to some older guys who would rather just fix copiers and not worry about how the print works.”

Turnover has not been a problem, said Wilbanks. The youngest technician has been with ABM for 10 years, and the longest 28. “We’re a small family business, and we treat them right. Dan pays our service guys and all of our employees profit sharing,” he said. “So they have a stake in whether we’re successful or not.”

“We give them the ability to solve problems and act on their own,” Wilbanks added. “That’s huge. A lot of companies don’t do that. When they feel like they’re kind of like the boss, they like that.”

Wilbanks also gives credit to BEI’s tech comp feature for the low turnover rate. “Our service techs like to make money,” he said. “When people retired, we have not had to replace them because our current staff is more than willing to do a little extra to try to pick up where the guy left them. They’re very eager to take on more copies. If that means they have to work a little extra, they will.”

Wilbanks estimates that the productivity of his technicians has gone up by 50 percent since implementing BEI.

“I saw the potential to get the technicians on board for reducing our parts usage,” said Phil, who introduced ABM to the BEI program. “Our parts usage was climbing at a pretty high percentage on an annual basis year over year. We saw a dramatic reduction in parts usage once we went on the program.”

The BEI program incentivized the technicians to use the parts to their fullest extent. Instead of leaving a part in a machine if it didn’t fix the problem, they took it out. Phil estimates that parts usage declined by 20 percent in the first year of using BEI, compared to a 15 percent increase previously. Parts usage continued to decline for another five years before it stabilized.

When ABM first implemented BEI, Wilbanks was one of the service techs. “I was fully on board with it, because our service manager at the time went back in the past and ran some numbers,” he said. “He showed how much money I would have made if I had done everything exactly the same. I was fully on board at that moment.”

“A good 50 percent of our techs were totally against it,” said Wilbanks. “They were saying we’re shorting the customers on parts. We’re trying to do whatever we can to make more money. It’s not fair to the customer.”

The other half of the team saw the value of it right away and started doing the total call procedure, said Wilbanks. “The techs that were against it are no longer here. It’s funny how they were the ones that weeded themselves out. They weren’t making the money and they were getting way more call backs.”

Wilbanks said that ABM’s current service techs are taking full ownership of the machines for which they are responsible, but they are willing to help each other out. “If I need to put a part in your machine, I will. But you have to put a part in my machine when I need it,” he said.

ABM is looking at implementing BEI’s new tech assessments feature. “I can look and see if my territories are aligned properly. I can easily compare one tech to another tech on cost‑per‑copy and his mean copies between visits,” said Wilbanks. “I can see which tech I think is the best, and I can have that tech share information during meetings if, say, he’s got a little tip that can make something last 25 percent longer.”

The purpose of tech assessments as ABM sees it is to identify best practices and match techs with jobs and clients that they are best able to handle. “If I see somebody that’s just way out of line, we sit down and talk about it,” said Wilbanks. “Sometimes it’s just a bad model.”

ABM got a little customer pushback on the BEI program initially. “Some of the techs were telling the customer how bad a plan this was,” said Wilbanks. “It wasn’t long before the customers realized that none of that bad stuff was actually happening. People were doing a total call.”

Under the previous plan, the goal was to fix the problem and get out. “It was putting out fires every day,” said Wilbanks. With a total call, the tech might put in a few more parts initially so the machines would run better, reducing the number of future visits. That drove down the cost per copy. “When our customers realized that, the tune changed,” he said.

ABM asks its customers to complete a satisfaction survey after each call. This gives them the opportunity to rate the experience and make suggestions for improvement. “I was really afraid to send these things out,” said Maucher. “Usually it’s just a big chance to complain. Believe it or not, 92 percent of those surveys we get back from customers are all positive.” Maucher added that the company shares positive comments on the surveys with the service techs. “They feel proud about getting mentions,” he said.

To keep improving customer satisfaction, ABM uses “seven or eight benchmarks that we look at religiously,” said Maucher. “We hit most of them, but not all the time. If we can be more consistent with certain numbers, that’s just going to improve us even more.” Sometimes a miss on the benchmarks is due to factors out of the service tech’s control, but Maucher said that it’s easy to identify them so it doesn’t reflect on the tech.

OTSEA Platinum award winners rank in the top 25 of all dealers evaluated.  The evaluations are based on Call Back percentage, Hold for Parts percentage, MCBV (Mean Copies Between Visits) and Technician Grading.  Tech Grading encompasses Time Accountability and Time Management along with individual HP, CB and MCBV rates as well as parts expense as it relates to parts CPC compared to world stats.