When dealer starts to look at the production print market, an easy assumption to make is that the existing service team can support the new product line. That assumption is dangerous and wrong according to everyone ENX spoke with for our February magazine feature, “Production Print Growth Drivers: Why Some Dealers Are Cashing In.”
John Fulena, Ricoh Production Printing Business Group
Production print customers run their machines long and hard, and their expectations for support are higher as a result. Downtime for a copier is an inconvenience. When a production printer goes down, revenue is lost, costs increase, and opportunities might be lost. “Most if not all our successful dealers selling production have dedicated people,” said John Fulena, vice president of Ricoh’s Production Print Business Group. “To Ricoh, that’s really a prerequisite. We’re always there as a safety net, but if they are not self-sufficient, it’s very hard to maintain and grow the business.”
Erik Holdo, Konica Minolta
Adding responsibility for production print to your copier service team is a bad idea, in part due to the more demanding expectations, but also because of the additional complexity of servicing them. That goes double for dealers who sell high volume inkjet systems. The higher up the production print market a dealer goes, the greater the commitment. “It’s really up to the dealer to make the investments needed to attack the market,” said Erik Holdo, senior vice president Production Print Solutions at Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. He noted that Konica Minolta makes all its production print offerings available to the dealer channel.
Becky and Bob Maxwell, Komax
“[Komax] made the commitment on the service side by training multiple technicians on the different production print products,” said Bob Maxwell, owner of Komax. “It costs you money to send those guys to school and takes a lot of time for them to do their certifications. But if someone’s spent $100,000 on a piece of equipment that’s going to make money for them and it goes down, they can’t wait until tomorrow.”
Hunter McCarty, RJ Young
RJ Young has gone another step and hired a full-time trainer who teaches its clients’ personnel how to use the equipment when it’s installed. If the client adds or replaces staff, the trainer goes back to work with the new person. “This cuts back on our service costs with what we call operator error where the operator didn’t know how to do a certain job,” said McCarty, COO at RJ Young, a Canon and Ricoh dealer.
“That’s why a lot [of dealers] have hesitated to get into production,” said McCarty. “It’s demanding, and the clients are going to need special kinds of services that you don’t normally give to your average client. These clients are going to need special attention from day one, and you’ve got to take care of them.”
Lucia Perez, Xerox
“At the beginning, support should start with print service and workflow assessments,” said Lucia Perez, marketing manager, in-plant for Xerox Corporation. “Then the dealer can help the customer develop customized applications or application configurations.” She also recommends ongoing service and maintenance check-ins and troubleshooting, and providing automatic system updates.
Response times vary from four hours for lower volume systems to two hours for high production units. Both dealers and OEMs stressed the importance of having service level agreements (SLAs) in place that spell out mutually agreed-upon terms and contingencies. A common contingency is that the dealer runs the client’s jobs on its own equipment if the customer’s machine can’t be fixed in a timely manner.
