Sometimes, printing devices break.

They break for a number of reasons from human error to wear & tear to age and it’s how a managed print services provider deals with the problem that can stand them apart from competition.

Working closely with Xerox, we run a tight operation that ensures our customers’ devices and services are up and running more than 98% of the time.

In this blog, we’re giving a sneak peek at the service delivery we offer and what the process looks like from our side.

Responding to an issue

When a problem arises, the first responder is the MPS Helpdesk.

We monitor your devices remotely, often detecting problems before anyone in your business. The need for break-fix, toner replenishment, maintenance, etc is flagged up on our systems.

When the issue is not picked up proactively, customers can call or email (often depending on severity of the issue) informing us of the issue, we use our specialist knowledge and online tools to determine a suitable resolution to the problem. We have a single point of contact for most hardware or software related issues that make up your MPS Plus - be it supplies and consumables, break-fix, advanced scanning/routing or document management systems.

Once we’ve found a resolution, we can start the process of getting it fixed by the specialist Xerox workforce.

Engineer Availability

As one of the largest print engineering workforces in the country with 500 engineers based in different areas, we often have flexibility in who to send to what location based on the nature of the issue and how quickly can they fix it.

Print Engineer Specialists

All of the engineers that attend to issues are specialists in both brand and product to ensure they know exactly what they’re doing when they get on site. They are trained and certified to repair certain devices and also have the capability of repairing devices of other brands.

By having specialist engineers, we can provide the best service to our customers based on the issue they’re facing and we can reduce the time it gets to get a fix put in place.

While all of this is going on, we do our best to keep the customer up to date with the situation and try to get the best resolution for all involved.

Parts Availability

Every one of the 500 engineers has their own van kit, which is based on their product skill set and when a part isn’t available from the van kit, there is a network of stores that can provide a part to an engineer either by same day collection or courier. Failing that, an engineer ordered part is generally delivered the next working day.

Response Times

The average engineer response time (measured from when the call is logged into the engineering system to the engineer arriving on site) is 4-6 hours. This figure does, however, vary based on the nature of the issue and in some cases, the engineer response time is as little as 2 hours.

First Time Fixes

With access to the right engineers and the right parts for the job, our first time fix rates are 95%!

Time to resolution

What really matters is not the engineer response times, but the time to resolution - a metric on which Xenith places far greater importance - after all, it is business continuity that matters to you the most.

We often find other providers make a lot out of how quick and responsive their engineers are to appear on site, but make no mention of how quickly those engineers have the device back up and running. We do, because we have the infrastructure in place to be proud of this statistic - including the parts on van, parts availability, first time fix, specialism and professionalism of the engineers, proactive service, Customer Replaceable Units (CRU) and last but not least, very robust hardware.

The time to resolution can vary depending on the product, for example, a small Phaser desktop device might have an average engineer work time of an hour while a larger production device might be nearer 4 hours.

We also have to consider proactive resolutions. This is when we proactively notice an issue rather than the issue being brought to our attention by the customer. At least 33% of break fix issues are proactively resolved by our team.

Our service delivery team works hard to ensure that your devices and printing processes are kept up and running consistently and when an issue does occur, we’re quick to react and keep the time to resolution as low as possible.