OMNI Business Systems takes service competence seriously.
At first glance, nothing about OMNI Business Systems seems out of the ordinary. As a mid-sized supplier of Ricoh and Savin equipment in the D.C. Metro area, the company manages a mix of government contracts and private sector clients. Many OMNI employees are U.S. military-service veterans, but that, too, isn’t uncommon for a firm based in Northern Virginia. But looking closer, there is one characteristic of OMNI that places the company ahead of its peers in the imaging technology industry and has elevated it alongside giants, including Costco, Amazon, Netflix, and the Ritz Carlton Hotel: quality of service, a standard that OMNI strategically calculates.
OMNI Business Systems boasts a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 92.98, making it the 92nd most highly rated company in North America in terms of customer service. This survey-based metric, which asks OMNI customers to rate the service they receive on factors such as how likely they are to recommend the company to a friend, is a common tool for service-focused industries. The average North American company has an NPS of approximately 30. Think of your cable company, your mobile phone service provider, your bank. Maybe pricing keeps you with them, or lack of options, or the hassle of switching. But you most likely don’t say, wow, I get amazing service there. Even Nordstom, a company that frequently makes headlines for the lengths its employees are empowered to go in the name of customer service, only rates an annual average NPS of 79.
How does OMNI do it? To find out, we started by talking to O.J. Coleman, OMNI’s vice president of service, who will celebrate his 20th anniversary with the company later this year. He was the first service manager OMNI, then called Fax Plus, ever hired. Initially, it was just Coleman and a handful of techs, but as the company grew, he was able to promote from within and some of his former techs are now service managers themselves.
“What I’ve found out over the years is that a certain type of manager might work well in one market but won’t work in another,” explained Coleman. “You need the right personality, be well-rounded, and know how to work with the entire team””administrative, sales, and manufacturers. It has to be a complete package.”
He also looks for individuals who don’t wait for direction and take the initiative to make things happen.
From the beginning, OMNI management has placed a high value on continuing education, particularly manufacturer training. At least one week of every month, someone on the OMNI service team is away on a training trip, whether it’s with Ricoh, one of its other manufacturers, or HP, which recently granted OMNI Premier Partner status. To develop its service team’s skills even further, OMNI is building an on-site training center where techs that received certification from a manufacturer can provide local training classes for the rest of the team.
Bruce Keenan is one of OMNI’s most experienced techs. He started his career in 1976 servicing Xerox equipment when the machines weren’t much more than a camera behind a plate of glass. After decades working for independent companies and 14 years running his own company, Keenan realized he was more interested in service than sales and joined OMNI in 2012. He now works on some of OMNI’s most sensitive contracts, including ultra-high security U.S. defense department offices.
At some of these sites, OMNI techs can’t bring in cell phones, laptops, or other non-sanctioned technology. The entire service manual is loaded onto the printer itself, and updates are handled through a highly monitored process of bringing physical media onsite for a security scan and transferring it to yet another medium provided by the government office.
Keenan also services some of Ricoh’s largest production machines, including a 37-foot monster that can print, book-bind, and trim. He’s the tech Coleman sends in on the rare occasion another tech’s visit has resulted in a low NPS rating. More often than not, it’s not a technical shortcoming that left a customer unsatisfied, but a breakdown in communication that Keenan, with his decades of experience, can easily rectify.
Mentoring new techs is a rewarding part of his job, but he makes sure to find time to train the users of the equipment as well.
“If they don’t know how to clear a paper jam properly and in the right order, they can end up leaving little scraps of paper in there that jam the whole thing up again,” said Keenan.
With highly specialized machines, a replacement part isn’t always in stock. In high-volume environments, this can cause a lot of stress. Any time a problem can’t be solved right away, that’s a dangerous spot for company-customer relations. For situations like this, Keenan turns to his soft skills.
“If you can’t fix the machine, you have to fix the customer,” he said. “The biggest thing you can do is let the customer know that you’re there to do everything in your power to get them squared away””whether it’s an equipment issue or a perception issue.”
In those rare instances where he must wait for a part to resolve an issue with a machine, Keenan always does his level best to appease the customer.
“I let them know that we’ve located the problem, we’ve ordered parts, and we’ll do everything we can to get them back on the road,” he said.
About 10% of OMNI’s customers fill out the NPS survey after each service call, and most give the dealership perfect scores. In December 2018, OMNI’s NPS average was 100%, statistically unlikely but not impossible to achieve with a personal touch. Whenever a customer expresses dissatisfaction, whether it’s in a survey, a call, or during a conversation with a tech, Coleman follows up to figure out a solution. In a world where more companies are relegating customer service to anonymous phone trees, customers often express shock when Coleman calls, which is a big contributor to Omni’s success.
“I’ve always felt I’m not perfect, no one’s perfect,” said Coleman. “There’s none of us that walk on water, but as long as we learn from our shortcomings, that’s the key. I don’t know what I don’t know, and without someone telling me what they felt, we’ll never improve. We sincerely want to improve and want to do a better job, and we strive for that.”
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