Is Your Service Provider Asking The Right Managed Print Services Questions?

Managed Print Services (MPS) always starts with an engagement process of asking questions. If your calling on a customer for the first time, make sure that you begin by asking the right questions - on the front end; ones that will let them see that you’re focus is to understand their current print environment. But do more with these questions. Suggest that their current Service Provider, if their doing their job and acting in the best interest of their customers, should be able to answer these questions. Suggest that if they have not been helping to identify the answers to these questions, they are probably not worthy of your continued patronage. 

These should be core questions, some more detailed, some a little broader in scope. Nevertheless, all designed to get the customer thinking and engaged; realizing that basic information that they should already know. Information that is vital to making good business decision about their print environment moving forward. By asking these questions, and others, you will begin to define your organization as one that seeks understanding and knowledge of existing environments. Make sure that you are clear in your approach; that good decisions are based on good information; that you would never propose changes to existing environment until you had a detailed understanding about the environment and the current business processes of how print is being address – today!

Some of these questions are:

• Do you know how many pages you print per month?
• What’s your goal for where you want to see your print volume be in the future?
• Which print devices are being over and underutilized?
• What are your plans for redistributing print devices to better meet corporate needs?
• How will this reallocation help to reduce equipment costs?
• Do you know the total cost of your global printing?
• What is your overall per page cost to print a single document; by model; by device?
• Can you break that cost down by toner, parts and labor?
• What are the areas of analysis needed to determine you’re per page costs?
• With toner making up 60% of your hard print costs, how do you monitor the yield, consistency, and quality of each toner cartridge you purchase?
• Is the quality of each cartridge your problem or your Servicing Company?
• When do you repair versus replace a print device?
• How do you monitor the quality of the provided repair services?
• Do you have a process to audit the efficiency of these services that is easy to use and always available?
• How does device downtime effect employee productivity?
• How many print related help desk tickets does your IT department field per month?
• What’s your internal IT cost per ticket?
• Would reducing IT involvement in print issues increase productivity?
• How many corporate dollars are tied up each month in inventory carrying costs?
• Do you know what your inventory carrying costs are per month on a per page basis?
• How many print related transactions do you process each month?
• How much do your companies print related transaction costs run on a monthly basis?
• Are you aware that 1-3% of corporate revenue is spent on print?
• Are you allocating print costs back to departments and cost centers? if so, how; if not, why not?
• Did you know that the accountability of allocating print costs back to cost centers can lower print volume by 10-20%?
• Did you know that 90% of all companies can’t answer these questions, do business with service providers that don’t offer solutions, and therefore never offer alternatives to their traditional approach to managing print?

Is your current Service Provider asking these questions, and assisting you in the process of identifying and lowering your print costs?

Through these questions, you will not only understand the current environment, but, you’ll also begin to understand the real business problems that your customers are facing; real business problems that your customer is facing and how your MPS solution can help to solve these business issues. This is how you begin to differentiate and define yourself as a trusted business partner.

Quote of the day:
"If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re liable to end up some place else." - Yogi Berra