How to Stand Out With MPS and Strengthen Customer Loyalty

This guest blog was contributed by Tawnya Stone | 12/3/13
When top applicants are competing for an open job, companies look for qualities and strengths that make a particular candidate stand out, something special that person can bring to the company. The same applies to MPS providers and their customers.

The job market is as competitive as the industry we serve, particularly if you are offering MPS. As the market continues to grow, many dealers are looking for new ways to differentiate themselves from competitors. Fleet monitoring, which includes remote meter capture, remote device information, and supplies and service fulfillment, has been continuously trending higher. It’s been focused on improving a dealer’s internal processes.

Dealers are now transitioning toward doing more than just monitoring devices and providing value to their customers. They are capturing printing behaviors to give users a way to print to lower-cost devices, both saving customers money and also increasing the percentage of the print environment they are managing. For example, printing to a multifunctional device rather than a local device is much cheaper for the customer, and typically, dealers are not managing local devices.

Offering fleet monitoring and user management as part of your MPS offering shows end users you are keeping up with industry trends and are offering something that will benefit them. Fleet monitoring and user management provides dealers a competitive advantage with the ability to offer something different – and better.

User management adds the ability to create a rules-based structure in the customer’s printing environment. This service can positively affect the customer by utilizing rules and managing devices while encouraging cost-effective behavior. Directing users to print to designated devices helps ensure the customer and company are both using best practices to manage output devices.

Placing rules such as defaulting to black-and-white printing and/or double-sided printing on a multifunctional device can help ensure end users are printing consistently. Just a few simple rules such as limiting color printing jobs or sending large print jobs over 50 pages to a multifunctional device, as examples, can positively improve the end user’s printing environment while providing immediate cost savings.

Alerts can be set up with rules to remind end users to keep these best practices top of mind. The ability to create printing rules based on the customer’s needs and goals is a powerful proposition. Not only does this help customers achieve their bottom line, but it also helps improve process workflow.

The easiest way for dealers to increase revenues is to maximize the environments they are already managing. User management allows dealers to capture a greater percentage of customer printing while providing measurable cost savings. Offering unique services that benefit customers is a fantastic way to build customer loyalty.

Dealers should consider partnering with a software provider that understands their business, is dedicated to growing their business and will help them achieve greater success. If you’re an office equipment dealer, strengthen your customer loyalty and have your MPS program stand out with the addition of fleet management. Like your next hire, you might just add something pretty special to your offering.

Tawnya Stone

Tawnya Stone is Director, Enterprise Strategic Technology, at GreatAmerica Financial Services Corp. (http://www.greatamerica.com). She is responsible for working with GreatAmerica vendors and dealers to find opportunities to improve their operational effectiveness. She is also instrumental in architecting the company’s technology integrations and other software solutions. GreatAmerica is a member of Technology United (http://www.technologyunited.com).