Luke Goldberg, Global SVP, Sales and Marketing, CIG and West McDonald, VP of Business Development, Print Audit, returned to the stage at ECS on Thursday, February, 18, at the Valley Ho hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, to present Seat Based Billing and Predictive Analytics, the Future of MPS.
McDonald began by describing his own approach to MPS assessments, which consists of one person actually collecting data and another engaged in the more personal approach of assessing the individual machine placements and asking questions about how they are used.
He says that this approach allows you to manage users and eventually “modify behavior.”
“What we mean by modifying behavior [is] to help them with their workflow,” he said.
McDonald also addressed the Top 100 Summit and how it was developed to “bring the brightest minds in the industry together” to forge new ideas and to drive change.
“One of the things that came out of it is [the] need to finally create seat-based billing,” he said.
McDonald explained how the Top 100 Seat-based Billing Council (SBB) was formed with 29 dealers and sponsor partners, all of whom helped contribute to the model. He said that they concluded that seat-based billing works.
In his presentation slide, McDonald pointed to a Photizo statistic indicating that 50 percent of people engaged in MPS right now are billing by seat. Even though the majority of those people are in enterprise, he admitted, it is still an eye-opening statistic. He related that HP and Xerox had told him that that is how they currently do it.
“That’s how customers tell them they want to be billed,” he said.
McDonald insists that this can be introduced to the mid-sized market and noted that some are already familiar with the model.
“The good news is that IT is already doing this,” he said. “There’s a model for seat-based billing in the IT world.”
McDonald says it is important to look beyond device data and look toward user-based data to create a seat-based billing structure. He says that understanding the “why” of printing is important for predicting user print behavior.
McDonald also pointed out that seat-based billing allows dealers to ‘cluster’ in services for additional profits.
“So just don’t make it about the toner,” advised McDonald. “You need to combine layers.”
Although optimistic, McDonald acknowledged that a mass conversion to seat-based billing won’t happen overnight.
“The good thing though is that the model has already been tested and [proven],” he said.
Luke Goldberg then said that he was optimistic that CIG would soon release a seat-based billing program.
“We believe that we can actually have a concrete program out – essentially a wholesale cost per seat where we will take on a lot of the risk,” he said.
Goldberg then discussed how CIG was working with Technology United to explore the evolution beyond seat-based billing. He said that they were in the “discovery stages” of utilizing captured data to change the service model from what is a “manual and reactive model” to a “proactive and predictive model.”
“We want this industry to be sustainable,” said Goldberg. “We have a vested interest in that. Everybody in this room has a vested interest in that.”
Editor’s note: We will be publishing articles covering many of the topics from ECS over the next two weeks.
