Recharger Magazine

The Services Your Customers Want

• By Charles Brewer
• Feb 01, 2008

Services are an important way to distinguish your business from the competition. Lyra and Recharger Magazine teamed up a while back to survey office users about the services they value from their printer cartridge supplier. OEMs have been working harder than ever to provide their customers with services including click-charge programs that offer customers certain advantages, like cartridge delivery and management services, while effectively locking out the competition. Aftermarket vendors have been offering services of their own to help increase their value proposition.

Remanufacturers can offer value-added services, too

According to Lyra’s survey, 99 percent of business users surveyed who buy remanufactured cartridges rated cartridge delivery and management services for empties as either “somewhat important” or “very important” (see Figure 1). Only 81 percent of the respondents, however, said they receive cartridge delivery from their aftermarket cartridge vendor, and 78 percent said their vendor offers empty cartridge pickup. These findings suggest that opportunities still exist for remanufacturers to offer value-added services.

Corporate customers who purchase OEM cartridges do not appear to value services as highly as do those who purchase aftermarket cartridges. For example, OEM customers do not display the same level of demand for pickup and delivery services. Twenty-two percent of this group rated cartridge delivery as “not important at all” or just “somewhat important,” and 36 percent felt the same way about empty cartridge pickup. The relative importance of cartridge pickup and delivery services to respondents appears to be directly correlated with office size. While 30 percent of sites with five or fewer employees rated cartridge delivery as “extremely important,” the percentage rose to 50 percent for sites with between 100 and 499 employees.

Despite the fact that businesses that use OEM cartridges do not rate most services as highly as do businesses that use remanufactured cartridges, cartridge delivery, empty cartridge pickup, printer maintenance, and operator training are welcomed by both groups. Services are playing a larger role in winning customers for OEMs and remanufacturers alike.

Click-charge programs

Cost-per-page, or click-charge, programs have been around for years. Pioneered by copier companies in the middle of the last century, these plans require users to agree to pay a fixed fee for their hardware based on print volumes. Usually, the fee includes the cost of any services and toner. Although the cost-per-page model is popular with copier vendors, printer OEMs also offer their own versions of these programs. The implications for third-party supplies vendors may be profound given that these programs do not allow users to purchase their own supplies.

About 30 percent of OEM and aftermarket users who took our survey listed cartridge delivery as the primary reason they would sign up for a click-charge program (see Figure 3). Although respondents expressed clear interest in subscribing to a click-charge program, roughly 20 percent of respondents said they did not know why they would sign up or were not sure. Obviously, companies will need to craft a clear message about click-charge programs if they are to attract more subscribers.

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To order your copy of At Your Service: Identifying Must-Have Services for Office Customers, please call Sandy Tobin at 617-454-2612 or visit www.lyra.com. This report, sponsored by NuPro, contains essential information on the differences between OEM and aftermarket cartridge users in the corporate environment. It looks specifically at various market conditions that affect which type of cartridge an organization will ultimately purchase. These conditions include the channels through which companies purchase cartridges, print volumes, and company size. The report also examines the services that some cartridge vendors offer and evaluates how much end users value these services.

This article originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Recharger.