Print.IT Reseller - issue 73

PRINTITRESELLER.UK 43 VOX POP continued... concern for our legacy MPS business was page volumes dropping, we could still support our clients’ home working requirements so they could also adapt to this fast-changing market condition.” Anna Muskett: “The past few months has seen us focus heavily on ensuring the safety of our people. Fortunately, home working is very much ingrained in our culture, so extending this across the business hasn’t presented too many challenges. We have also taken additional steps to protect our global service teams. We have increased our use of remote monitoring and service to ensure we keep customers up and running and continue to provide essential service in locations where government mandates permit.” Mike Barron: “Everyone wants to see business recovery quickly when we come out of lockdown and we certainly feel positive about the prospects. As for ‘the new normal’, we will have to wait and see. I think what this experience has taught us is that we do all depend on each other; it will be important to keep on supporting each other as commercial activity starts to ramp up again. Managed services and cloud will be even bigger opportunities going forward – customers will be able to see the value of having back-up, security, voice services, networking and apps all managed for them by expert providers even more now.” Emma Davies-Carolan: “As ways of working have changed, our HR team has become far more focused on employee wellbeing and keeping the team connected, alongside our employee social committees who’ve organised a number of virtual events, from quizzes to Friday drinks. “The crisis has also given us the opportunity to embrace cross team working and support company-wide development via online Q&A sessions. We’ve also adapted the onboarding process and existing learning and development programmes such as our global sales onboarding and leadership training.” Phil Madders: “I think we are in for a tough 2020. What I can confidently say is page volumes will be down significantly in April and May in the UK market as there is no-one in the office to produce a document. I expect this means there will be an acceleration away from the reliance on the printed page to other sources of revenue. Business Analytics, Document Management and IT Services, all offer our channel partners Martin Fairman: “We have been working closely with our partners to understand the impact this has had on their business and the challenges they are facing. Lexmark’s Channel MPS service offers data and analytics capabilities that enable our partners to manage and monitor print fleets remotely, perform predictive analysis that eliminates printing downtime and manual intervention, as well as providing great insight for continuous improvement. We are also in the process of familiarising our partners without enhanced and service upgrades as we are acutely aware this is not the time to be upgrading print estates, so this will enable our partners to make additional margin during the months ahead.” Liam Fitzgerald: “Vendors and resellers alike are adapting their businesses to meet the rush for home office devices and remote solutions. Without IT teams or engineers on hand, customers want new ways of diagnosing and resolving technical issues for their employees and we’re providing free Remote Panel licences to enable partners to monitor their customer's printer remotely without the need for engineer visits, by remotely diagnosing and resolving printing and scanning issues. “While print volumes have dropped in some sectors, they have remained constant across the grocery market and in some areas of public sector. We have adapted our logistics processes and capacity to ensure our resellers can serve this demand by supplying the devices they need quickly, while closely managing our ink and toner replenishment cycles to ensure any downtime is kept to a minimum. Collaboration between vendor and reseller is vital if the end-user is to get the best outcome.” Clive Hamilton: “We adapted our business relatively smoothly in dealing within the new environment which we find ourselves working in. The first thing we did was to reach out and understand what our customers’ pain points are and how we could support their requirements to enable them to continue with work as effectively and efficiently as possible. “Pinnacle were in a good position to respond to these requirements because of the services and solutions which we can offer over and above print. One of the biggest challenges however was how quickly and agile we could be to support our customers’ needs. Although an early As for ‘the new normal’, we will have to wait and see. I think what this experience has taught us is that we do all depend on each other PrintIT Reseller: How optimistic are you about market recovery, do you think there will be a new ‘business as normal’ and where do you see the most opportunity in terms of services and solutions? We are seeing greater interest in our IT services, which allow organisations to run seamlessly from home. Solutions that optimise processes are proving popular as they invite users to obtain greater efficiencies and simplify complex workflows. Jeremy Spencer