It’s no secret some of the toughest competition distributors face today comes from the big box stores selling printing, stock forms and supplies, coupled with online ordering convenience. What may not be so well-known, however, are the competitors’ strategic plans for future growth. Below are highlights from an April interview conducted by Cary Sherburne, senior editor of graphic-arts community website WhatTheyThink.com., with FedEx Kinko’s acting CEO Brian Philips. Philips offered insights into the enterprise’s current priorities and objectives going forward, which are summarized here.
• Our dual objectives are to drive profitable core copy/print growth and profitable shipping volume growth. We feel we are doing the right things on both fronts. Office products are more of a convenience for our customers. But, we are never going to out-staple Staples on office products, nor are we trying to. It is more of a 7-Eleven plan on office supplies. When people ship or print, they are doing a lot of other business with us as well, including office supplies. We see a lot of attachment.
• Close to 90 [percent] of all of our [FedEx] account holders use the FedEx retail shipping channel at some point in time during any 12-month period. In some instances, large customers use us as a drop-off point when mobile professionals are on the road, or as a backup to their courier, since we have the latest cut-off times in the market. For consumers and small businesses, we are almost an exclusive access point and they use us for most of their transactions with FedEx.
• We have great detail on what shipping customers do in copy/print and office products, for example, when shipping was the primary purpose in coming to us. We can see how other things attach to copy jobs, particularly office supplies. We have also begun to bundle things together to encourage customers to buy more than one service when they do business at our centers. For example, we provide notary service, and we bundle that notary service with copy and an overnight envelope. Most of the time when something is being notarized, it is a critical transaction and the customer wants a document to retain, as well as to get the document where it needs to go as quickly as possible. Sometimes a customer buys a banner, and we roll it up, put it in a tube and make it easy for them to protect their product.
Another example is combining an office product with a service to add value for the customer. There are dozens of ways we do that everyday. We are not necessarily discounting the bundle. Sometimes, it is just bringing components together to make it more convenient, combining common things customers might not have considered otherwise.
• FedEx Kinko’s firmly believes that the future includes a robust online channel. For us, that online channel has several components, including the online catalog capability that is DocStore, and online print-and-send capabilities like Print Online. We are investing even more aggressively in those platforms to get out in front of the needs of customers and prospective customers. We have seen great success with online channels and significant growth. Some of the volume is migrating from old-fashioned means of tendering jobs to FedEx Kinko’s, but a good portion is Net new. Our intent is to embed ourselves in every desktop in the world, and we are doing that in a variety of ways, including alliances that you will hear more about ... .
• Online is where we want to be, and embedded within the user’s applications is how we want to approach it, through software providers, associations and other alliances you will hear about over time.
Our goal is to put our functionality in front of large communities of users, so ... people have easy access to prepare, ship and track packages. [The Web] saves the customer a trip into the store, and it actually improves the communication between our customer and the folks that produce the print jobs. We improve quality, we improve turn time, and we make it a better customer experience because the tool itself guides the customer through the decision making with regard to their print job, and that information feeds straight through to our production network. As a result, we get it right, on time, every time. It is amazing how much of a win/win online is for our customers and for us.
• FedEx always stays on the leading edge in terms of technology. It is our competitive advantage and the foundation for many things that are now standards in the industry, like tracing and tracking, online preparation of labels and packages, billing online, etc. FedEx and FedEx Kinko’s believe that IT investments are the key competitive advantage in the print and copy business as well.
There are investments we are making to improve inventory and warehouse management to fine tune our supply chain for office supplies, for example. We’ve also discussed creating a single account number across FedEx so that FedEx customers can use their [nine]-digit FedEx account number for shipping, printing and office supplies, and be rewarded for being a loyal customer under all of these businesses. We already have a rewards program in place for FedEx Kinko’s one-account-number process. It is a massive undertaking, but it is well underway and we will start to gain benefit from it in the near term.
For more information, visit www.whattheythink.com.
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- People:
- Brian Philips
- Cary Sherburne