Safety officials advise against swimming in fast “currents.” Solutions Specialist Rachel Rhodes doesn’t have that luxury.
What’s "current" in the business technology arena moves faster every year, month, and even week. She remembers the “bolt-on” from just a few years past: You want OCR? We’ll need to add that functionality. You want tracking? We’ll have to add that.
But all that’s well out of style by now. Integration is “in.”
Rachel is an expert swimmer when it comes to staying afloat of what’s new, what's emerging, and what should be dispersed to the Texas team. Part sales support/sales manager, part billing and financials consultant, solutions trainer and ultimate solutions expert: Rachel moves fast with the rising tides ahead.
The Rave Review asked her about how we at Datamax “swim with the current” in regards to our solutions-based offerings; how we address pain points and turn them into relevant solutions; and what it takes to stay in stride with a rapidly-moving ocean of information. Here are her thoughts.
1. Establish trust with accounts. And then go “all in” on a custom solution.
If a customer comes up with a request we’re not familiar with, we’ve got to do our best to craft a reliable solution.
About five years ago, one of Datamax’s largest accounts approached Rachel about developing a print remediation process, to essentially assess their print devices and look for vulnerabilities.
“They were basically looking for a book to say, ‘if I have this printer, I need to turn on these best practices to make sure there’s no security vulnerabilities,’” Rachel Rhodes. “At the time, we weren’t even sure exactly what that looked like.”
She reached out to manufacturers, who at the time lacked a reliable map for such a process. But as a team, Rachel and others developed a customized approach to guide best security practices and proactively protect the company from print device-related vulnerabilities.
“It was a huge undertaking. Now, of course, that information is readily available,” Rachel said. “But we were living this five years ago.”
2. Keep your eyes and ears peeled to what’s ahead.
Whether it’s a dealer meeting or solutions forum, or one of the thousands of marketing emails that come across Rachel’s desk, she’s engaged.
“When I have downtime, I see a new release or an email about a new solution, I’ll take some time to go through it. If it’s something I feel like we need to go deeper in, I send that to our solutions team and recommend that we get it on the demo floor,” Rachel said.
Manufacturers, she says, are constantly adapting to needs and listening to pain points from customers to provide upgrades and updates. It’s our job to stay tuned in.
“It’s in our best interest as a dealership to be on that bleeding edge of technology,” Rachel says.
3. Keep our head in the cloud.
COVID-19 changed just about everything on this earth – including the perception of the cloud.
“You had to be able to have the tools to work remotely,” Rachel said. “No matter where your company offices out of, universally that’s something we had never experienced before last year… I think because we are more remote, any kind of cloud integration, be it document storage, scanning or printing to the cloud, it’s going to be something that becomes more and more embraced.”
Canon uniFLOW – an output management solution that offers a cloud-based, sever-based, and now hybrid platform – creates that advantage for companies looking to initiate a more cloud-based approach to print management.
“Right now, we’re in a unique time. But I don’t think our workplace is ever going to be the same again,” Rachel said.
