As a complement to this month’s State of the Industry report on technical service, we canvassed the industry’s leading manufacturers to solicit their opinions on the optimal qualities of an office technology dealer’s technical service platform.
We asked our panel of OEMs to address the skill level, tools, standards and managerial focus necessary to succeed in today’s market. The panel consists of Greg Gumpright, director, service and support for Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America; Kenny Hiteman, vice president, services and support—Americas, Toshiba America Business Solutions; Kevin Streuli, director, field and systems support, Solutions Support Division, Konica Minolta Business Solutions; Joseph Contreras, commercial marketing executive, Office Solutions, Epson America; Leroy Farrell, vice president and general manager, Engineering Service and Solutions, Canon U.S.A.; and Jim Coriddi, vice president, Dealer Division, Ricoh USA. This input is intended to provide the basis for a dealer’s ideal technical service program.
Greg Gumpright
Director, Service and Support
Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America
Every service organization needs a strong, understanding leader to help guide and motivate the team to strive for the next level. This leader can be a mentor, a coach, a cheerleader or simply an ear to listen. Service leaders wear many hats, but they generally are watching out for the bottom line for the company while delivering the best customer experience. This can be a challenge and a bit of a balancing act at times.
Any service department needs to put customer satisfaction as its number-one priority. After all, without those customers and their recurring business, a dealership will be far less successful.
I have always followed the idea that service and sales departments must work together to be successful. They need to openly communicate with each other and alert each other to any customer concerns that may arise. The most successful dealerships/organizations that I have been a part of have had extremely strong relationships between service and sales.
Technicians must be given the tools to allow them to deliver the best service possible, since there is a lot of information that they need to remember. Some of these tools are things such as access to service information via laptop or other mobile device.
Quality training is also very important to a service department being successful. Not only the technical training, but also the basic customer service training. Not everyone is born knowing how to handle difficult situations, and when you are going in to service a broken device, you will either be greeted with open arms from the customer or you may need to practice some customer service skills before diving into any technical work. This is an area I’m personally passionate about and discuss with service leaders whenever we meet.
You also really need to have a service hierarchy that allows for service employees to call in a different set of eyes when necessary (without fear of ridicule). Our greatest place for learning is out there in the field. Often, the simplest of problems can just be missed, and you could end up going down the wrong “rabbit hole.” Bringing in a second opinion may do the trick. This is a great learning experience.
Overall, a service organization should have a team feel. There is a coach (service leader) and a team trainer (trainer or field manager) who make sure the team is fit for play, and the team itself. Additionally, there are the all-stars, the go-to team members when needed. There are also those members of the team who provide support and keep things moving in the right direction.
My last recommendation for a strong service organization is having some type of definitive recognition program. Sharp’s dealers are recognized yearly with our Platinum Level Service Provider program. We also hold a yearly Master Tech competition. The 2019 event was exciting and brought an unprecedented level of energy to Sharp’s dealer service technicians across the country. It was very competitive, and I’m looking forward to the next competition to be announced.
Kenny Hiteman
Vice President, Services and Support – Americas
Toshiba America Business Solutions
Delivering premium service, training, and customer support to our clients and reseller partners is paramount. In fact, we grade how well our authorized dealers are meeting and surpassing our established performance levels in these three areas through Toshiba’s ProMasters Service Excellence Award certification and recognition program.
The program establishes standards for Toshiba dealers while serving as the industry benchmark for service excellence. Equipping our technicians with such industry-leading tools and training help facilitate their success.
We best support our clients through Toshiba’s Quality Commitment Program. Should a customer’s copier, printer, fax system or accessory fail to perform within product specifications, we’ll replace the product with an equivalent or better model for free. If the replacement occurs within a year, Toshiba will install a new system. Toshiba additionally provides loaners if the client’s equipment is out of service for more than two consecutive business days or requires off-site service.
Kevin Streuli
Vice President
Solutions Support Division
Konica Minolta Business Solutions
Today, a service department needs to be able to expand beyond the copier/printer and be vested in providing customers with additional products and support for the office space. The service department needs to be looking at all products a customer requires to run their office. Other services would include managed print services (MPS), application solutions, telecommunications, security and IT support. By providing customers with a variety of products and support, it makes it more difficult for the competition to win that customer over.
A successful service department will also invest in its people, with the necessary training and certification on the products they sell. Building a team that includes its own internal escalations on unresolved issues will provide customers with a timely resolution to their service needs. Investing also includes making sure the field technician’s cars are appropriately stocked. This will shorten the length of time to a resolution, which impacts customer satisfaction.
The key to a successful service department is to always inspect what you expect. Setting up processes and procedures is necessary for every business, but if you assume everything is working best as planned, then you’ve set yourself and the department up for failure. This requires checks and balances. Most employees want constructive feedback along with reasonable and attainable goals to grow themselves professionally. If a company does not provide these things, they may not succeed as you or they had planned.
Many business owners believe true success in the service department is about controlling costs. To do that, it starts with hiring. Technicians of the past could get by on a basic electronics background and decent customer relations skills. Now, so much more is expected. The technicians need to be self-managed, self-motivated individuals. If the time is spent up front on hiring people with these traits, the company will be stronger. This will also provide a path for those who wish to be more than a field technician. People who share common goals with you and believe in solid moral grounds will lead to success. These are the leaders of our future. Take the time to get to know them before you hire them.
This leads to putting the right people in the right seats. Nobody likes the hiring process, and many will take shortcuts to fill a seat. Turnover is one of the greatest failures for any manager, and also a very expensive one. Managers need to look at themselves when an employee quits or is let go due to performance. It is always easiest to say they didn’t work out for one reason or another. But if the manager had done more during the hiring process, they might have discovered this person wasn’t a good fit, or recognize that this person has goals. In order to make employees successful, you have to provide them with a path to achieve those goals.
Joseph Contreras
Commercial Marketing Executive
Office Solutions
Epson America
When it comes to dealer technician skill sets, one tends to think of technical and mechanical skills such as proficiency in electro-mechanical print engines, understanding differences in various printing technologies, network certifications and image-quality adjustments. In today’s business climate, working smarter, not harder, is key. Utilizing remote service tools such as Epson Remote Services (ERS) allows service departments to operate more effectively and efficiently by gaining real-time insights on the fleet of Epson printing devices that they manage. The intelligence that ERS provides enables technicians to understand how their MIF is performing and be well prepared in the rare occasion that a service call is required.
Beyond that, soft skills are also highly important and should not be overlooked. Customer service and building rapport with
end-users makes the experience much more positive and enjoyable. After a sale is completed, customer retention becomes the responsibility of the service department. A service technician is the face of the dealership for the duration of the relationship and plays a key role in ensuring that the dealership is well positioned for years of repeat business.
Lastly, in today’s market and moving forward, we see an opportunity for the service technician to become a technical consultant, offering advice on how best to utilize and optimize the printing technology the customer has, while also expanding sales opportunities for other solutions and services the dealer provides.
Leroy Farrell
Vice President and General Manager
Engineering Service and Solutions
Canon U.S.A.
Establishing and strengthening customer relationships is especially important while navigating through the hybrid work environment, so prioritizing technical service can help dealers succeed in today’s market. Focusing on enhancing customer service through new opportunities, technologies and ideas can help dealers stay efficient.
As dealers continue to look for new ways to expand business and improve sales tactics, embracing virtual communications, including virtual training courses and demonstrations to remote customer support enhancements, can be beneficial. Virtual trainings and courses, such as those offered by Canon U.S.A., can provide dealers with tips on how to expand sales efforts as well as innovative ways to implement technology in today’s changing workplace.
While organizations continue to navigate through the new normal, it becomes increasingly important for them to be equipped with solutions designed to provide security features and options, especially when working with confidential business and customer information. And for dealers, it’s important to offer unique and differentiating solutions. Choosing solutions Canon offers, such as augmented intelligence assets, virtual presence and predictive logic, can help dealers find ways to support their customers in the hybrid work environment without losing the human touch.
Over the past few months, businesses have remained efficient by being nimble and shifting business priorities to address and overcome obstacles while meeting both customer and industry needs. Therefore, when considering ways dealers can shift their focus and standards in today’s market for success in 2021 and beyond, creativity and adaptability are top of mind. Focusing on these key factors can help dealers think outside the box for new ways to help optimize business.
Jim Coriddi
Vice President
Dealer Division
Ricoh USA
Dealers with the best tech services are the ones who are extremely responsive to customer demand. When so much of the world shifted to remote work last March, smart dealers acted quickly and proactively to scale up their support. Forward-thinking dealers have been shifting toward a cloud-first strategy for months, or even years now. In November 2019 at ConvergX, Ricoh’s Partner Leadership Forum, we made a strong case for the cloud-first approach. That set the stage for our dealer partners to play a major role in customers’ business continuity this year. The cloud’s scalability and flexibility make adjustments faster, easier and more effective.
The optimal traits of a dealer technical service department are ones focused on:
- Consistently delivering a great customer experience.
- A workforce that is well trained on all the products and services they’re required to support.
- Armed with all the necessary tools and parts to effectively support their customer base.
- Key performance indicators that report on the business-critical components of managing a technical services department, including financials, business performance, resource utilization and customer satisfaction management.
- Leveraging technology to enhance the employee and customer experience.
- Proactively advancing their service delivery models in support of evolving customer requirements (IT services, MPS, cloud, mobility, subscriptions, remote workforce, self-service, etc.).
Tom General
Distance Learning Supervisor
Kyocera National Training Center
Kyocera Document Solutions America
A salesperson once told me, and he was sincere, “I might make the first sale, but my technician always makes the next one.” He’s right. A technically proficient, confident and efficient technician who takes a tough customer problem and turns it into a satisfying solution is also an effective salesman. Technicians deserve the best training available to ensure that “second sale.”
To accomplish this, a quality technical service department should routinely evaluate its training needs and effectiveness while taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible. This should also entail home-grown customized individual training programs.
Every office should have a training advocate. This doesn’t have to be a manager but could be a lead technician who knows the dealership’s machine population and fellow technicians’ technical proficiency.
They should ask these questions:
- Are all technicians trained on all active products supported by their dealership?
- Does each technician have the essential skills needed to successfully do the job?
- Are there any areas for improvement (software, hardware, network or customer skills)?
- Are technicians aware of, and do they possess, all resources available to them (online knowledge base, current service manuals and bulletins, service call information and history)?
Our training programs actively encourage technical development with training proficiency tiers. Technicians are encouraged to progress through the tier program aimed at helping them master increasingly complex skills. A dealership should actively engage the Kyocera tiered training program and add any in-house training unique to their organization. Utilizing this approved roadmap will more closely align Kyocera training requirements while enhancing a dealer’s technical workforce in our industry in general.
Finally, Kyocera provides extensive technical resources on myKyocera.com. Every technician should know how to access and navigate the site and routinely use this important resource. They should register every technician so that the techs can sign up for Kyocera-approved courses and receive technical updates in their email.
We’ve made these training resources available for our business associates, and we actively encourage them to promote and utilize them inside their own organization. We believe this can reduce training bottlenecks, increase technical understanding and enhance our working relationship. In the end, a knowledgeable technical force which solves problems the first time leads to a more cost-efficient and technically capable service support organization.
