Ricoh Canada strengthens customer service and project delivery with ServiceNow

Ricoh needs to deliver world-class customer service and project management to satisfy its customers and maintain its competitive edge
Ricoh supports its customers by managing and optimizing their information workflows through a wide range of workplace solutions and digital transformation services. Historically, Ricoh is best known as a leading manufacturer of printers and other office equipment. However, the company has built a significant services business around documentation, ranging from consulting and support through to complete managed services and platform hosting.

To serve its customers and maintain its competitive advantage, Ricoh needs to deliver world-class customer service and project management. This was a driving force for the company’s decision to embark on a broad-reaching digital transformation strategy that would achieve efficiency, responsiveness, and a better customer experience through automation.

Ricoh’s professional services team required clear visibility into customer demand and resource utilization
As Ricoh’s business expanded, so did the challenges their professional services team experienced with demand and resource management. The team didn’t have any visibility of upcoming customer orders, which had a direct impact on the scope of work. They also lacked a global view of resource utilization, which was handled internally by each department. This affected staffing and made it difficult to track projects accurately.

Ricoh chose ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management to create complete project management visibility
Having experienced multiple challenges and limitations with a well-known project management tool, Ricoh turned to ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management.

Nathalie Pougno, Director of Digital Transformation at Ricoh Canada continues, “It’s not just a project portfolio management tool. It’s a flexible platform where you can easily add new modules and capabilities. That gives us something we can grow into as we continue our digitalization journey.”

ServiceNow gives Ricoh’s professional services team one place to access and review all of its orders. Since it has been integrated with Ricoh’s sales management platform, sales representatives now only need to complete one simple demand form. This provides the professional services team with complete visibility of all its projects and the resources working on them. In fact, Ricoh says that ServiceNow has proven to be a complete game changer.

Ricoh is adopting ServiceNow Customer Service Management to secure government contracts
Ricoh is now taking advantage of ServiceNow Customer Service Management, which was critical in Ricoh Canada securing a large government contract.

“As part of the contract, we needed to deliver a customer portal,” says Nathalie. “ServiceNow Customer Service Management made this simple. With the portal, government employees can easily order services from the catalog.”

Nathalie continues, “One example is device lifecycle services, which includes ordering, installation, moves, and renewals. Government employees can also get real-time status updates for their orders and incidents. The portal also provides users with self-service access to training, user guides, videos, guided tours, and more—it’s a complete solution.”

Ricoh sees this recent government contract as the first of many, with the company already positioning ServiceNow for a second major government opportunity. As well as providing a customer portal, ServiceNow serves other key government requirements such as bilingual support and a robust role-based security model. Data residency is also crucial, with ServiceNow storing all customer data on Canadian-based servers.

Ricoh aggressively extends ServiceNow into other areas of its business, including its eDiscovery legal services
Ricoh Canada continues to extend ServiceNow into other parts of its business, such as its eDiscovery legal services. These services provide document management for legal reviews and litigation, including document searches, processing, and analysis, as well as legally defensible collection of forensic data.

To deliver these services, Ricoh must manage complex workflows for customer legal data. Evidence must be tracked as it is handed from one team to another. Previously, Ricoh would manually document the chain of custody, but with ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management, they can now easily create flexible, automated workflows that are built right into every project.

ServiceNow also allows the eDiscovery team to work in a more collaborative manner, which is critical given the sensitive timelines within the legal environment. Having all the project data accessible in one system has also increased efficiency and has reduced monthly invoicing efforts by 50%.

ServiceNow Customer Service Management is also critical for Ricoh’s eDiscovery team. Lauren Nikoletsos, Project Management Office Manager for eDiscovery at Ricoh Canada, says, “The ability to integrate our workflows directly into a customer portal was one of the biggest reasons why we went with ServiceNow. Our customers want real-time information—and especially for budgets, since these services can be quite costly. They also want to know exactly where we’re at in the process and when they can expect things to be ready for review. With ServiceNow, we’ll be able to give them that.”

Ricoh considers ServiceNow to be a pillar of its ongoing digital transformation
Having experienced resounding success within various parts of its business, Ricoh is now considering bringing additional teams onto the Now Platform®. For example, capabilities such as asset management could help Ricoh Canada grow the services they offer to their customers. Likewise, Ricoh is also hoping to extend the solution to manage contracts and entitlements as part of the huge potential ServiceNow offers in automating processes.

Mike Fast, Ricoh Canada’s Chief Operating Officer says, “ServiceNow is one of the key platforms in Ricoh Canada’s ecosystem responsible for driving digital transformation. Best practices and the out-of-the-box approach allowed us to uncover synergies among lines of business that streamlined our service delivery processes in record time.”

Nathalie concludes, “We’re proud of our culture of innovation and teamwork. ServiceNow has enabled us to deliver on that by augmenting the impact of our team internally and for our customers.”

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