Servcorp - Thinking Outside the Box

In an increasingly competitive market, Servcorp believes that providing customers with state of the art, user friendly technology is integral to its success. From its Australian head office, in partnership with Canon, the company is rolling out a constantly evolving yet standardised IT solution that is paying back in efficiencies, profit margin and customer satisfaction.

Malcolm Sanders, Senior Manager of Digital, Design, and Projects and Daniel Kukucka, Chief Technology Officer from Servcorp tell the story.

We’re an Australian company, founded in 1978 in Sydney, and over the past 20 years, we’ve established a truly global presence. Our business provides workspaces such as serviced, co-working and virtual office facilities and technology to enterprises that have the flexibility to stay with us for whatever period they require to grow and establish themselves.

Our main point of difference is that we choose premiere office locations – that’s because we believe location is one of three pillars to an SME’s success in growing their business. Being in the right location means you can meet the right type of people, get the right type of business, and grow your business as well. So we’ve got offices in premiere locations like Barangaroo in Sydney, Dimension Data House in Wellington and the World Trade Centre in New York. We’ve also established Servcorp offices in landmark buildings in Chicago, Indonesia, Kuala Lumpar, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Osaka, Singapore and London.

Our offices have a standardised look and feel and increasingly, the technology and services we provide are consistent as well. Recently we have focussed on standardising our technology because we recognised the major challenge we had looming due to the multiple different devices installed across our sites.

We had different systems for faxing, printing and copying, all from different vendors and customers had to use different credentials to access each of them. It was difficult for them to remember the passwords to access each device, let alone how to use them. From our business perspective, invoicing customers meant we had to pull data from different systems then collate it. On top of that, we were working with multiple vendors to have equipment serviced and updated, and paying multiple bills. It was messy and time-consuming, and with our plan for global expansion it was only going to get worse.

We spent 18 months investigating the options to standardise our technology and we settled on Canon for a few reasons. Their global presence was important. It meant we could work with the local team to trial a proof of concept in Australia then use these local contacts to broker the roll out internationally. Most importantly, Canon was the only company that could provide us with all the hardware, plus the managed maintenance and consolidated invoicing. So now we receive one invoice every month; and all of our IT uses the same drivers and provides customers with the same experience. It works. 

A Strategic Relationship That Works

A lot of companies talk about offering a strategic partnership, but once you enter an agreement you find it’s transactional. With Canon, it’s
been a different experience – it really is a relationship. We are working with people at all levels of the organisation and together, we’re innovating with Canon product to evolve the level of technology we offer our customers.

We’ve shifted from a system that enabled customers to push print then simply collect their document from the nearest device to one that enables people to push print then, when they’re ready, identify themselves at the device they wish to collect from, by scanning a gold dot affixed to their building access card.

I have to admit that for some customers that extra step was seen as an annoyance however with the help of Canon they have realised the security and efficiencies this system provides. Jobs are no longer left lying around for anyone to see, they can collect them whenever and wherever they want, and if they decide they no longer want to print a job they can cancel it – which saves them money. From a business perspective, our administrators get an accurate account of who has printed what, when and where from uniFLOW, which also provides us with analysis of printer productivity and functionality across offices, regions and even countries.

User experience is of course, vitally important and so for ease of use and consistency across all Servcorp offices, we have customised the printers’ LCD screens. This means every user has the same experience wherever they are.

Now we’re working with Canon to develop an Application which will enable all of our customers to use their mobile phones to activate the technology within any Servcorp office. The App means as soon as a customer walks into a Servcorp building they’ll be identified by their smartphone and they’ll gain immediate keyless access to their office, as well as access to the Wi-Fi, their individual phone service and the printers. They will also be able to add devices to their network by scanning a QR code.

Our new technology was exceptionally well received when we rolled it out in Australia and now, we’re finding that rather than proposing it as a solution to other Servcorp offices in the world, they are coming to us and asking for it. Everyone’s really excited - we’re seeing revenue and productivity benefits, reduction in IT overheads and reporting. The key benefits are great and they’re growing all the time.

Servcorp OneAP

Servcorp teamed with Canon to integrate uniFLOW into their smartphone app OneAP, allowing them to provide their customers with an alternative to the usual card, AD or dot authentication methods. OneAp is installed on customers’ phones and uses Bluetooth technology to allow them to seamlessly log into Servcorp’s Canon MFDs. Beacons were installed on the devices, and when the customer’s phone is within a 20cm radius of the beacon it will log them in. Leaving the radius will automatically log the user out. Servcorp use OneAP to give their customers access to offices and also to log them in to workstations, providing a seamless experience from the moment the user enters the co-working space.