I have so many thoughts about Ricoh and our business of outsourcing but I'll spare everyone from my rambling and keep this as brief as I can. I only worked there for 4 years but I've been a contractor since 1994, so I know how this game works. We spend every day doing everything we can to get invited back tomorrow. When our access badges make that sound at the card reader in the morning when we walk in, we know we did something right. Anyway, Ricoh spent 7 years trying to get into the corporate headquarters of a world wide health care organization. When they finally got it in 2013, I was hired for that one person site that had so much potential to grow into having several Ricoh employees and lots of equipment on site. After 3 years and 3 managers later, it stayed a one person site until 2017 when they lost the contract to Xerox. No one paid attention to it. No one cared. I begged everyone who would listen to help grow the account. The Ikon acquisition with all of those managers with a combination of zero on-site customer experience and a deep-seated anger towards being acquired finally did us in. The day my manager sent me an email at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon in September 2017 to go to his office the next day. was the day I had been waiting for. It was a relief. No more angry managers. No more incompetent sales staff. I was finally out. Ricoh completely screwed themselves by giving the keys to drive to former Ikon managers. They should have stuck with what they had before the acquisition. Everything was working just fine.
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Know-it all, Belligerent IKON management ruined this company by protecting the good old boys network. Management made it very difficult for customers to easily do business with them. Ricoh invoicing is a cluster without support to reconcile. Management was so paranoid of sales reps quitting and taking customers to their own business or competitor, Ricoh abandoned benefits of relationship selling and would change sales reps in middle of contract. Ricoh hung themselves by screwing over sales reps that did the grunt work and later after contract signed, transfer the account to a good old boy equipment rep uneducated in the specialty of the solution. Golden rule #1, customers buy from people they trust, when the person they trust is replaced with someone the customer needs to re-educate or to re establish trust or lack of, the company eventually loses client. Ricoh doesn’t understand that people buy from people, not an overcharging company.
Watching this scenario play out at a large corporate account that we will probably lose one day. Agree regarding Ikon. Unfortunately, Ikon was able to eliminate a lot of the good people that were here. Understand what you mean about being a relief.