Even in this era of online reviews and Trip Advisor ratings, recommendations that come via word-of-mouth remain a powerful way of convincing potential customers to consider using a specific product or service. For Integrating Solutions Limited (ISL), a leading independent supplier of multi-functional photocopiers and Managed Print Services, the service it provides has been the subject of many positive conversations between schools, academies and local government bodies like Transport for London for many years. This has resulted in a business that has prospered – with little or no promotional activity – since it was founded in 2005. Today, it works with leading print brands including Sharp, Ricoh, Kyocera, Lexmark and Toshiba, offering bespoke connectivity and print cost analysis, resulting in best-of-breed solutions for its corporate and SME clients. Through its innovative print audit products, ISL has consistently managed to achieve savings in excess of 30% in relation to clients’ existing print cost expenditure.
In the last 16 years, the company has expanded its footprint, with various offices strategically based around the UK supporting customers across the breadth of the country. Today, the company supports a customer base whose devices produced in excess of eight million printed pages last year. To help counter its clients’ print volumes and the effect upon the environment, ISL is an active participant of PrintReleaf, a software platform that empowers businesses to sustain and grow the global forestry system by planting a tree for every page ISL’s customers print. This is a benefit that ISL offers all of its customers free of charge and which also complements ISL’s ISO 14001 Environmental Management System.
The attentive service ISL provides is one quality that its many long-term customers enthuse about most, as Simon Wassell, Director ISL, explains. “At ISL, we’ve put into practice something that’s often spoken about but rarely realised; proactive, preventative maintenance that sees our field service teams make regular prescheduled visits to our customers. During those once-a-quarter visits, they carry out maintenance tasks ranging from updating firmware to cleaning machines and replacing consumables that are near the end of their life. This ensures that customers’ devices are always in excellent working condition, reducing downtime and all the inconvenience that comes with devices being offline.” With each machine benefitting from a minimum of four visits per year, preventative maintenance accounts for almost 80% of the activities that ISL conducts on behalf of its customers, helping to minimise the time the company spends on reacting to breakdown calls.
Underpinning its proactive maintenance program is cloud-based Asolvi Vantage Online, which provides ISL with field service information in one place and ensures that customer data is accessible via a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Integrating seamlessly with Vantage online to provide the company with print monitoring insights, is MPS Monitor 2.0 from MPS Monitor, the company that develops and distributes the leading platform for the remote monitoring and management of printers and multifunctional devices.
Talking about why ISL decided to deploy MPS Monitor, Simon stated: “Our former data collection agent (DCA) hadn’t really moved on. It was the same tool we had been using for a number of years. As our customer numbers and their print volumes increased, we needed a modern, scalable and secure DCA solution. It was clear to us early on that MPS Monitor not only met our monitoring needs, but its compatibility with other CRM applications essential to our business made it an obvious choice.”
Almost a year after deploying MPS Monitor, Simon has no regrets about ISL’s decision, claiming that “MPS Monitor’s ability to provide us with pure data and detailed analytics is unmatched. It delivers detailed, meaningful, business intelligence that’s easy to view and understand.” He added: “Because the data is easily accessible, our help desk and service desk teams use it too, helping them to gain real insights into customers’ print relating to pages printed, toner coverage and print volumes.” This helps ISL’s print guidance to be based on quality information that leads to better informed decisions being made about devices that are under- or over-used.
When asked what has impressed him most about MPS Monitor, Simon detailed three qualities that stand out. “First, the ease of integration with devices and other applications is seamless and stress free. Integration is absolutely essential for us, and the MPS Monitor team worked really hard to ensure that it this was successfully addressed. We’ve had no complaints from anyone about MPS Monitor, and the service team absolutely love it, not least because it is so easy to install.”
Second, in addition to MPS Monitor’s solution best meeting its needs, Simon also sees parallels between ISL’s customer-first focus and MPS Monitors. “From the outset, we really liked the team,” he stated. “They went above and beyond the call of duty with respect to meeting our needs and requirements. Their can-do, tailored approach, was very refreshing compared to some more established competitors, who had a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude to their offering. MPS Monitor’s openness and honesty helps build the sort of trust that long term relationships are founded on, and their personal touch has been very welcome. Finally, the pricing is very fair, especially when you consider the richness of the data provided, and, more importantly, its state-of-the-art DCA technology, security, integration, consumable logistics, contract management and advanced data analysis functions, all of which are all top-notch.”
With MPS Monitor now playing a key role at ISL, there’s even more reason to talk about the company as it looks to an exciting new year ahead.
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