I had an informative interview with All Covered’s Vice President of Marketing Nick Pegley about Managed Services and the growth of the All Covered network last month at the Konica Minolta dealer meeting. I’m writing that article now and it will appear later this month in ENX/The Week in Imaging.
As I’ve been transcribing the recording of that interview and piecing together my article it got me thinking about the constant evolution of this industry, an industry where service has always been the primary differentiator and a critical talking point whether it’s actually being delivered or not. How many of your competitors tout their service capabilities when you know for a fact that they’re just not that good?
I get the impression, customers who receive bad service know it while customers who receive superior service either know it or it’s so good it’s transparent to them. Like many of us (think cable television service), plenty of a document imaging dealer’s customers who receive less than stellar service prefer to stick with the status quo because it’s too much trouble to switch.
Before I digress any further let me circle back to the relationship between service and services. In an industry whose foundation is service, Managed Services/Managed IT Services, and even MPS can be viewed as not-so-distant cousins of traditional break/fix service even if some of those services are more conceptual rather than revolving around a physical product.
No matter how you slice it, dice it, or puree it, the service component within the document imaging industry is expanding and redefining itself and creating new opportunities for the traditional document imaging dealer. And organizations such as All Covered and others that are aligned with other manufacturers represent the wave of the future…at least for now. You can be sure that three, five, or ten years from now when we talk service, we’re going to be talking about it in some of the same ways we are today, but differently too as new services emerge.
What’s next? I’m not sure. After all, I don’t know what I don’t know yet. But in another few years, we’ll all know it and be talking about it, and I’ll bet some of you will be delivering those services.
Thanks for reading.
