Liam Fitzgerald, head of commercial channels and MPS service delivery at Brother UK, outlines three key features of managed print services that are often overlooked by resellers.
The as a service model has never been more popular. Look into any home around the country and many must-haves are now delivered on a subscription basis: TV, smartphones, even mid-week meals.
That’s because people like the hassle-free nature of clicking subscribe and letting the vendor – whether it’s Netflix, O2, Hello Fresh or one of the myriad other vendors – do the rest. Plus, it can be helpful to pay for these things monthly rather than as a one-off when money is tight.
The same applies for businesses. Business owners and managers are seeing the benefits of procuring their tech on as a service models and that’s particularly the case for print.
Demand continues to swell for managed print services (MPS). But many resellers remain content sticking to selling print transactionally. That may be down to misconceptions of the true revenue opportunity from MPS, or on how complex or expensive it is to deliver.
I want to dispel those myths.
There are significant benefits to resellers to offering MPS. Some of these benefits are obvious, but others fly under the radar. Here are three that aren’t always considered.
1. Flexibility built in
Printing requirements differ from business to business and customer to customer. I know that resellers are keenly aware of this and go above and beyond to deliver the tailored packages that work for their customers. And MPS can play a crucial role in this.
It’s easy to consider MPS as one solution that print infrastructure is then moulded around. But really it’s the other way around.
There are so many facets to firms’ print estate and wider IT infrastructure that it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all solution. At least not one that effectively serves IT managers’ needs.
At Brother, for example, we go out of our way to ensure that a contract and a printing arrangement works for resellers and customers. This means early engagement with partners to find out how they’re equipped to provide MPS – if at all – and working with them to carry out a needs-based assessment for a customer to find out where managed print will make a difference to its operations.
We’ve also launched our MPS Essentials offering, which allows resellers to put new and existing devices onto agreements. This means customers can access the benefits of service printing, but with the ability to cancel at any time so that they can maintain the agility they need in their operations.
2. Support that never stops
Ongoing support for hardware acquired on an MPS contract is a common benefit but what is less well known is the extent of it.
Having to be on hand to support customers should anything go wrong is a daunting thought for resellers just starting to provide MPS, as is the expense of retaining external engineers. But MPS places the responsibility of maintenance on the vendor, not the reseller.
We take that responsibility very seriously. The service-level agreement on our MPS contracts is to provide a response on any issue within four hours. Currently, our average response rate is 77 minutes, and if we don’t find a solution in that time, our own expert engineer will be on site the next working day.
This level of support means the up time across all Brother hardware in field on MPS contracts is 99.96%. That’s crucial for firms that rely on printing round the clock, whether for invoicing and shipping, or for mission-critical documents in professional services sectors, from law to accounting.
And this is just one example of how MPS has been designed to lessen the load for resellers and help them to concentrate on deepening relationships with their customers and tap into new opportunities.
3. Bigger margins
Embracing MPS is a business decision, and margins and the financial returns on that decision ultimately represent the defining factor.
Contrary to what some resellers think, MPS doesn’t mean accepting lower margins compared to transactional sales – over the lifetime of a device, they’ll actually increase.
The cost per page rates will vary depending on the agreement with the customer, but the enhanced consumables business created on contracts means that print partners can expect bigger profits.
On a Brother MPS agreement, for example, we monitor the usage of consumables on behalf of the reseller free of charge, and will ship replacement toners or inks to customers on a just-in-time basis. All this saves the reseller time and logistical costs.
Plus, our indirect sales model means the end users always remain customers of the resellers, ensuring that the opportunities our partners secure are protected.
Beyond the commercial benefits of capitalising on a growing market there are opportunities here for resellers to expand their revenues, become more efficient and build stronger relationships with customers.
Competition in the market is growing, so every edge that partners can gain over their rivals is worth its weight in gold. Knowledge of some of the hidden benefits of MPS is one of the sharpest edges they can utilise.
