Jun Ho Son
Office technology resellers looking to increase the value their customers derive from their electronic assets through increased uptime have a few options they can turn to assist them in that mission. One of those is Innovolt, a provider of power protection and power management solutions to the office technology industry.
“Our technology improves efficiency and our dealer customer’s ability to be responsive to their customers to increase end user satisfaction,” states Jun Ho Son, Innovolt’s CEO.
And when Son talks about end user satisfaction and even customer satisfaction at the dealer level, he’s referring to an important point of differentiation, as Innovolt has a well-earned reputation for focusing on the highest levels of customer satisfaction along with offering competitive pricing to its resellers without sacrificing margins.
When you raise the issue of power protection and power management with anyone at Innovolt, from Son, to Ben Grimes, CTO & senior VP of Operations as well as VP Walter Crowder, expect a lively conversation rooted in technology and the basics of power protection and management.
Son explains that when people think about power protection technology, they think of it as insurance against catastrophic failures, which is a fine starting point for anyone selling the technology. “That’s easy [for them] to understand,” he says.
But there’s a lot more to the talk track than that, and with power disturbances happening more often than people realize, Innovolt is concentrating on protecting against a wider range of power disruptions.
“That’s allowed us to change the economics because if you understand the connection between these power disturbances and the result in terms of downtime, error codes, parts, and labor, it has a big economic impact on the life and utility of the uptime of the electronic equipment,” explains Son. “That spans all the way from Segment 1 to production printing—anything with a board or microprocessor.”
Walter Crowder
“As the equipment from OEMs becomes more and more sophisticated and everything becomes faster and more connected, the prevalence of trouble caused by electricity gets bigger and bigger,” adds Crowder. “That just lends itself to the need to have great tools at your disposal to keep your customers happy.”
“We’ve spent the last two years working with our customers to collect data to show the direct connection between the more comprehensive protection our technology provides and increased uptime and the substantial reduction in service calls,” says Son. “When they see emergency service calls have gone down by 40-50 percent that’s meaningful and eye opening.”
In an era where everyone seems to be capturing data, both big and small, Son is determined to collect even more of it. For instance, Innovolt compiles comprehensive data that illustrates the benefits of its products. This data can then be used by the reseller to not only improve productivity within their own organization, but to increase their relevance to their customers because the reseller now has access to information that helps provide their customers with highly relevant information about infrastructure issues that affect them beyond their printing and copying equipment.
“Having insights of what the power profile looks like in your customer’s environment, this is something you can have discussions about,” suggests Son. “To be honest we’re only scratching the surface. How our dealers are using that data, not just for increased productivity, but how they’re sharing that data with customers.”
“We’re learning more ourselves,” he continues. “For example, we always knew that we had a significant impact on service calls but when we drilled down to the types of service calls, we actually had some of the most dramatic results in reducing copy quality issues. Once you see such results, the connection between power and copy quality seems easy to explain in retrospect, but it’s the breadth of our protection that takes use beyond “insurance” and into the realm of more comprehensive service and quality improvement.”
When it comes right down to it, success in the power management space is all about collecting more data and building that capability into new power protection and management technology.
“From a pure technology perspective we’ve grown our capabilities in collecting the physical data around the customer’s installed power environment,” says Son. “We’ve boosted the communication capabilities within our products to enable that data to be collected a lot easier by the technician, or it can be connected directly to the Internet and redirected to our cloud. Dealers can then sign in and look at their fleet and see what’s happening.”
He adds, “More importantly that’s great information, but it’s the correlation of that back to the customer service records. We work hard with our partners and dealers to take a look at the service records prior to us being installed and after we’ve been installed.”
Innovolt is now creating a big set of information that can provide interesting correlations.
“We can then drill down even further and as we build that set of information we can see trends in terms of how power issues correlate to service calls,” says Son. “The more data we collect, the more information we have that helps us from a marketing and sales perspective, but also helps our team from an engineering perspective because we can work with our customers to see correlations that will allow us to build some [capabilities into our products] that will be more predictive in nature.”
Beyond this focus on providing increasing amounts of data, Innovolt can also help its resellers break into new markets and expand their footprint with an existing customer. It doesn’t hurt that Innovolt technology is relevant for any type of electronic equipment no matter the industry. For example, Innovolt is assisting one of its dealers in the Southwest penetrate the casino market.
“They’re not necessarily going into gaming services, but bringing in another service (power management) to help their gaming customers be more productive and profitable,” notes Son. “It gives our customers some brand permission with a very relevant and immediately beneficial offering as they look for new areas of growth.”
It’s all well and good to offer a product that yields all these benefits, but who in the average dealership is most receptive to Innovolt’s message?
“It’s a mixed bag. In some dealerships CEOs and CFO’s are very tuned into it because of profitability and customer stickiness,” responds Crowder. “So we have to attack and get the buy in from them and they push it down to their P&L. Then there’s another group that would prefer their technical team make the decision. It also resonates well with the service team.”
One segment of Innovolt’s organization that never rests is its engineering team who actively interact with Innovolt’s customers and partners to learn how to make the product better and not just from a pure technology perspective.
Ben Grimes
“Everybody in our company is engaging at different levels within the dealerships,” observes Grimes. “From my perspective those relationships are critical for the success of not only that dealer, but our company as well. Having my engineers spend time in the field with Walter and his team gathering that information enables us to adapt our business model and technologies to best fit the dealers in the quickest way possible.”
What’s next?
“From a platform perspective without revealing what we’ve got going on under the hood, expect to see continued enhancements on the data side,” responds Grimes. “We will start capturing different types of information; we’ll do that organically and in partnership with other companies who have already started working with in this space. You’ll also see enhancements in terms of what you can do with data, and we’ll have more solid use cases to help our customers start down this path.”
He adds too that the company will continue to offer a wide range of amperage products required by the marketplace.
“We’ll continue to add more functionality and remain competitive; that’s something people are surprised about,” states Son. “When we describe everything we do it almost sounds like a Cadillac then they realize what we’re asking for pricing wise is much closer to a Chevy Malibu.”
Also expect to see more diversification in terms of where the company is driving business from in addition to leveraging the relationships that the office equipment dealer has had for many years with their customers.
“I’m blown away by the strength of those relationships,” says Son. “No one tries harder to make their customer happy than the dealer community. We want to help them enhance those hard-won relationships and if we can show them other things we can do that will make everyone happy.
