High Efficiency, Tech Empowerment Keeps Service Quality High at The Office Advantage

Mark Van Den Hoek, Owner

When you do business in a large, sparsely populated geographic area, service-call efficiency takes on a much higher level of importance. No one—whether management or the service techs—wants a second 300-mile round-trip service call, just because the right part wasn’t on the truck the first time.

The Office Advantage does business in just that kind of area. Based in the small town of Mitchell, South Dakota (population 17,000), this Xerox dealer serves a wide area that includes eastern South Dakota, southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa, and northeast Nebraska. That represents a radius of about 200 miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where The Office Advantage opened an office in 2005.

Owner Mark Van Den Hoek called 2016 a “banner year” for The Office Advantage and expects to grow more this year. “Based on what we have in the hopper, 2017 is going to be significantly better than 2016. Most of that is because of managed print accounts, acquisitions, and growing our service base,” he said.

“We’re lean, very lean and everyone wears a couple of hats,” said Van Den Hoek. “We’re flexible; we’re small enough that we can react quickly. We work really hard to assemble a team that is able to do the right thing. Flexible might mean flexible enough to take care of the client and flexible enough to respond to what the market is doing.”

To be lean and flexible, while still effectively providing service to a large area, is a big accomplishment. For that reason, The Office Advantage has won this month’s BEI/ENX Service Excellence Platinum Award.

The Office Advantage started as a Xerox authorized sales agency in 1993. Today, it is a Xerox authorized partner. The company serves mostly small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but has some major accounts as well. About 20 percent of its revenue is in production and enterprise accounts.

Most of the company’s growth is coming from its SMB business. Production and enterprise are growing several percentage points slower, according to Van Den Hoek: “As hospitals, insurance companies, and other verticals move more and more toward a digital dissemination of information, production print volumes go down.”

The Office Advantage sells production print systems for data-driven applications such as policy prints for insurance companies. Van Den Hoek recently hired a production-print systems analyst to help build that business.

Service Is About Empowerment

“Service is our mainstay,” said Van Den Hoek. “I come from a service background in other industries, so I’ve seen some unfortunate things happen in service. We work hard to grow, but it has to be profitable and with the right client base.”

Working hard at service means focusing on every aspect from the time help desk answers a call to when a follow-up call is made to make sure everything went as the client had anticipated. “Without good service, we’re just another company,” said Van Den Hoek.

The biggest service challenge for Van Den Hoek is maintaining service consistency, regardless of who does the service. “The client should expect to receive the same level of service always,” he said. “If you’re not trained, you ain’t going [on the call].”

The consistency of service that The Office Advantage service technicians provide gives Van Den Hoek the confidence to let his team make their own decisions in the field. “We empower our people to do the right thing at all levels. That empowerment is evident at all levels and channels of our business,” he said.

Van Den Hoek is concerned about those decisions affecting profitability, and that’s why he’s careful to provide counseling and coaching for his service technicians. “Sometimes those decisions haven’t been in the company’s best interests, but if you empower people to do the right thing and do it immediately, your phone doesn’t ring much on the service side with people being upset.” He believes those times when a decision was not in the company’s best interest were outweighed “tenfold” by the advantages of empowering his technicians.

When a service technician makes a decision that Van Den Hoek does not like, he treats it as a teaching opportunity. “I try to leave the ropes loose enough that they’re empowered to make those decisions, and sometimes it’s just ‘we’ll talk about it later.’ After awhile, [the sense of empowerment] becomes the culture of the business.”

Good Before, Better Now

Van Den Hoek was confident that The Office Advantage was doing well managing its service operations before the company implemented the BEI program. There is always room for improvement, he believed, and it would be good to know how The Office Advantage stacked up against other dealerships. “We’ve only been a dealer for 10 years. We hoped that by engaging BEI early on, we would avoid some of the mistakes others have made,” he said.

The Office Advantage is using BEI to monitor hold-for-parts and call-back performance. This is a logical approach, considering that it’s not uncommon for their clients to be 150 miles away. “We had a few tweaks to make, but it was rewarding to know that we were already doing a good job,” said Van Den Hoek.

BEI has also provided a means to build a rewards program for The Office Advantage’s technicians. “We hadn’t found a good model to do that. If the technicians do a good job, we want an efficient and effective tool to measure that,” said Van Den Hoek.

Van Den Hoek also likes that he can use the data from BEI to not only measure performance internally, but compare The Office Advantage with the industry averages. “We’re kind of data freaks here because of our background. It’s always good to have industry data to benchmark yourself against,” he said.

Van Den Hoek found that The Office Advantage was already performing well, but he has been able to use the BEI data to improve performance even more. The improved performance includes better car stock inventory efficiency and fewer hold-for-parts calls. ‘We’re getting the technicians to do a complete call versus a ‘we’ll fix it and go home’ kind of thing. The holes we found in our original assessments have been filled really well,” he said.

He credits the improvements to two factors. The first is the reward incentives for the technicians, and the second is the coaching opportunities provided by the monthly BEI data. It took a few months for the technicians to get comfortable with the program, but the improvements began once they understood the program and how it benefitted them. For example, BEI allowed the technicians to be better prepared to do a complete service call and avoid going back for a problem that could have been addressed earlier. “We don’t like emergencies,” said Van Den Hoek.
“BEI gave us data to reinforce what we were already doing,” said Van Den Hoek. “It gave us a good feeling from the executive level all the way down to the technicians. That’s been manifested by comparing ourselves to the rest of the world.”

The next step for The Office Advantage with BEI is to assess contract profitability. “Contract profitability is huge,” said Van Den Hoek. “Now that we’re getting everybody dispatched in good shape with all the right parts, the next big thing is determining which of these contracts are profitable and which aren’t.”

Looking Ahead

Van Den Hoek continues to look for ways to improve The Office Advantage’s service operations. One way is to train help desk and dispatch personnel to recognize calls that may not need an on-site technician. “Without irritating the client, help desk will ask a few questions to determine if it’s a break/fix situation or something we might be able to do remotely,” he said, adding that the company is also enhancing its remote capabilities. “If we can avoid 3 to 4 percent of our calls, the clients are going to be happier and we’re going to spend less money dispatching technicians.”

Given the success of the rewards program for service technicians, Van Den Hoek would like to improve on it and extend it to everyone on his team. “If employees are happy and content, keeping the clients satisfied is easy. If they feel empowered and know they have something to look forward to from a rewards perspective, taking care of the client is second nature,” he said.

Other dealers that have had The Office Advantage’s level of success might not put the same effort into continuous improvement. But Van Den Hoek believes he has no choice. “If you don’t evolve, they’ll put up a for-sale sign [on your business]. This industry is mirroring the computer and server industry where the hardware has been commoditized years ago,” he said.

“We’re continually surprised at how quickly new ideas or technologies have become commoditized as dealers look for new revenue sources to offset the losses in print revenue,” said Van Den Hoek. “Six or eight years ago, it took a couple of years for a new idea to be commoditized. Now it’s commoditized in six to eight months. That evolution continues to surprise us.”

Eventually, that might require dealers to rethink their service offerings and pricing model, Van Den Hoek believes. “To follow the managed IT business, the industry is going to evolve to a total seat-based business at some point. I really see that happening where you’re going to provide desktop services, but you can also provide printing output and scanning services for a fixed price-per-user,” he said.