by Neville Chaney
Constant evaluation, constant improvement are two fundamental aspects of the WJ Office mantra. They have been for more than 45 years. For evidence of this, let me present some facts about our tech team, a group comprised of service techs, management, sales staff, and admin support.
First off, there is a routine that never wavers. We start our week with a status review of orders outstanding and we identify exactly how close these are to installation at the customer site. We bring our service manager, sales manager, admin support specialist, our director of administration and the president into a room to review the equipment on order, its estimated time of arrival, status of equipment to be installed, and equipment sold the previous week. We also assess the status of customer equipment that will be returned to the proper leasing company that we have replaced. Our admin support manager runs this meeting and leads us through the equipment status report, and we go over what we have coming up in installations for the coming week.
The service manager then presents the prior week’s metrics including the number of calls by technician, our response time, the number of machines that have had three calls in a 30-day period (if any), and any challenges that his department is experiencing. We are consistent with this each week. Each person understands that he needs to be at this meeting and the admin support person understands that he needs to have this material ready. No excuses!
The result? We have a truly clear view of our service metrics. In many weeks, our response time is far better than the industry standard of four hours. Each person who is a stakeholder in making sure that things are flowing in the right direction can feel confident that WJ Office is operating at an extremely elevated level. The sales manager can go into the field knowing that he has a formidable team behind him operationally and he can learn about and better satisfy the needs of his clients.
Having viable equipment lines is important. However, equally vital to have the people in place to support those product lines. HP, Savin by Ricoh, Epson, and Brother are well known and respected in our industry. With two technicians each with more than 25 years of experience and a former technician as a service manager, many service issues are resolved over the phone. Since our service manager also dispatches the service techs he can better describe what they can expect to see when they arrive at the customer site.
This total team effort is ongoing and demonstrates why once someone becomes our copier or printer customer they STAY with WJ!