Jennie Fisher
A year of continued change and opportunity in the industry … and for GreatAmerica! As we enter 2012, we are very excited to see the energy that remains around implementing managed print services. Office equipment resellers are focused on further evolving their businesses down the MPS path and evaluating areas for improvement. Our recently completed annual customer satisfaction study showed that 59 percent of respondents have implemented MPS into their organization. This number is up from 52 percent last year and has consistently increased each year since 2006. In the past six years, the majority of our customers who have successfully sold MPS have taken the approach of placing new hardware at the inception of the transaction, allowing us to finance and administer charges on the monthly output. Today we see dealers moving to the “land grab” approach, securing a service contract on all existing devices and folding in new hardware six to nine months down the road. Our new Fleet Billing product provides a solution for GreatAmerica to handle the administration of these types of transactions even when there is no financed hardware initially in the picture. This dovetails nicely with helping our dealers become more administratively efficient, and it also provides the advantage of giving the end user the same invoice and payment structure throughout the life of the contract. The technology integrations we have with the various dealership ERP systems also make this process nearly seamless for our dealers.
We continue to see the evolution of technology in the marketplace. Many dealers are adding managed network services, leveraging technology and the cloud to enhance their solution offerings. Our annual survey revealed that 27 percent of our dealers have implemented managed network services, and 55 percent of those that have not are at least thinking about it. GreatAmerica is in the ideal position to help our dealers move down this path through our managed network services offering – Collabrance. Collabrance is the perfect option when it comes to partnering to enter this new key growth area because it is a very cost effective and low risk way to enter the managed network services business. Collabrance allows a dealer to fully own and maintain the relationship with their customers, but have the remote tools, resources, and support of a highly experienced and trusted partner. We have many years of proven experience at providing help desk support with our FleetView product, and three years ago, it seemed like natural next step for us to move down the MNS path. With Collabrance we provide the platform for a dealer to offer end-user “IT road-mapping” and support through a single turnkey solution. It is offered by the dealer to their customers under the dealer’s selected private label brand. The Collabrance Network Operations Center (located at our facility in Cedar Rapids, IA) provides a dealer with all of the remote elements like: remote monitoring, remote remediation, network security, data back-up, and a full array of cloud based options. In addition, Collabrance provides a fully staffed help desk to trouble shoot and support end-user issues. The dealer provides the sales effort, ownership of the customer, and any on-site work that may ever be needed. It really is a wonderful way for a dealer to get into this business! In 2012 we will continue to focus on helping dealers make a smooth transition into the MNS business, and we will also provide training options to help existing Collabrance dealers more effectively add new customers to their network services business.
As a finance company, we are seeing changes in the competitive landscape of the office equipment market. Many of the leasing companies that exited the market during the recession are back and aggressive trying to gain back accounts with low rates. We are quite focused on how we can improve the value we bring to our customers by providing tools and resources to the market that will help them create greater success in their organizations. In addition to the resources we bring, we will remain committed to customer service excellence and the ethical business practices that have served us and our dealer customers, and in turn, their customers for so many years. All in all … we are geared up for another successful and exciting year!
