Automation and Efficiency Keep South Coast Copy Systems at the Top of the Service Game

It’s a long road from selling used office equipment from a garage in San Diego to becoming a successful Canon dealer with more than $10 million in revenue and 45 employees. That’s the story of company CEO David Mann and South Coast Copy Systems (SCCS). Now celebrating 20 years in business, SCCS saw its best fiscal year in 2016 with nearly 15 percent annual growth.

What’s driving SCCS’s growth? It was a decision a few years ago to get into production print and managed IT services. Both components are experiencing over 10 percent annual growth according to Mann.

The word Mann uses to describe SCCS is “progressive.” “We don’t stand by status quo. Status quo is not going to get us where we need to go, which is to grow. A few years ago, we got into managed print very successfully, and now with production print and managed IT services, we’re continually raising the bar.”

The company also raises the bar when it comes to service – one of the reasons it won this month’s BEI/ENX Service Excellence Diamond Award. “Our customer service differentiates us from competitors,” said Brett Hartgrave, SCCS’s service manager.

(From left) Brett Hartgrave, Service Manager
and David Mann, CEO

“The quality of service is significant; BEI allows us to measure very accurately the real substance of the quality of our service department,” said Mann.

Hartgrave sees proper inventory management as a key challenge to retaining high service quality. “If the techs don’t have the proper inventory, it really puts a damper on performance,” he said.

“The basic nuts and bolts are a big challenge to any service department.”

It’s also important to provide a career path for the company’s 15-person – and growing – technical service team. “We don’t want to hire an entry-level technician and keep him/her there indefinitely,” said Hartgrave. “We’re continually striving to provide an upward career path for the service employee, possibly into bigger equipment or network services.”

If that path leads into the IT service side of the business, “We pay for classes for technicians to achieve certification in A+, Net+, Security+, even MCSE,” said Hartgrave. “We also provide training during work hours or using overtime, if need be, to be able to get time in to train.”

Another career opportunity for SCCS technicians might be to service larger production equipment. “The training provided by Canon has been fantastic,” said Mann. “By taking our technicians that expressed a desire to go to the next level, we were able to grow into production print 100 percent internally.”

“One of the things we’re most proud of is that we’ve taken full advantage of the Association of Technical Service Professionals (ATSP) certification program that Canon provides, and have achieved an ATSP certification for the dealership 10 consecutive years,” said Mann. This puts SCCS among the elite Canon dealers in the United States in regards to service technician proficiency. “It is a big teambuilding, motivational and spirited competition once a year to achieve the best in that certification.”

SCCS also takes the unusual step of handling all copier service requests through its IT support desk. That way, a live person can handle any of the IT concerns that may be associated with the copier service request as it relates to network printing. “The technicians are able to focus on hardware issues while network queries are handled immediately in-house, reducing our technician-dispatched calls by over 30 percent,” said Mann.

“As a Canon dealer, we utilize Canon’s ‘Smart Dispatch’,” said Hartgrave. “Canon has an intuitive software program for our IT support desk to be able to accurately give clients directions on standard user-operable maintenance for the copier, such as cleaning the glass or doing adjustments through the operator panel for copy quality. There also is documentation that our support team can email which has step-by-step instructions. In this way, the client can resolve their own issues without the need of a technician.”

Establishing a Service Baseline

SCCS had a clear idea of what it wanted to accomplish with BEI. “We were looking to establish a baseline, a status quo across the board allowing us to compare ourselves to our existing baseline, our existing historical data, and then to other companies/technicians nationwide,” said Mann. “Without BEI, it was difficult to obtain accurate monthly and annual historical data that was true to form.”

Before BEI, SCCS’s technicians questioned their historical data. BEI made it easy to sit down with a tech and analyze all aspects of their performance. This allowed SCCS to maximize the team’s efficiency.

“We were able to discover the best technicians on certain models and make sure that they’re the ones taking care of that portfolio of our base when service was needed,” said Mann. “It also allowed us to get away from micromanaging each technician and each service call. We could compare historical data on that technician’s performance and make it easy to compare or provide a baseline for that technician, especially as it relates to his bonus structure on BEI.”

New building

That bonus structure through BEI performance helped sell the service techs on the program. “It’s ultimately money in their pocket,” said Hartgrave. “There’s an incentive for the technician. ‘I’m not just doing this for the company’s benefit; I’m doing this for my own growth as well.’” Mann said it took about six months before the technicians recognized that benefit. “That’s when they started seeing the return on their complete First Call Effectiveness as it relates to commissions through BEI. When they get that first nice commission check, it’s downhill from there,” he said.

Award-winning technicians

There has been a measurable difference in customer satisfaction with service, too. “After every service call, every customer gets a survey to review our service,” said Hartgrave. “They can also leave their own comments, and we’re getting positive remarks like, ‘Technician really communicated well with us.’ It’s great seeing that.”

The company also utilizes CEO Juice to help set benchmarks on the sales and management side of the business. “Our personnel growth really has been in our sales department through the past two to three years,” said Mann. “We’ve significantly ramped up our sales department as our service department performance has increased without significantly increasing our personnel in the service department.”

Migrating Copier Service to an IT Model

What’s next for SCCS with BEI? “We really want to move on from the traditional copier service industry to an IT service perspective, which is being able to clear the calls remotely, improving our first-call effectiveness and dropping response times dramatically,” said Mann. “We’re moving toward an efficiency level much like an IT company would offer.”

Quality Service Relies on Good Communication

“Customers need someone who can really listen to their issues,” said Hartgrave. “Techs are consultants when they’re at the location and an ear for the customer more than just a hardware guy going in with his tool bag and fixing the copier. It’s more of a personal experience.”

“Communication, I think, is the biggest thing,” said Mann. SCCS notifies customers immediately when their service call has been placed in the queue and then when a technician is in-route.

They’re also emailed a survey when the service call completes.