Ricoh USA announced recently it’s laying off about 5% of its 26,000 staff in the United States.
John Greco, company spokesman stated the company’s changes are meant to make it easier for customers to do business with Ricoh and that nearly half of laid-off employees “will interview with other members of the Ricoh Family Group dealer network.”
Ricoh is selling accounts to the local dealers mostly from the mid-range products to the low-end. They also intend to push more telemarketing and online support to eliminate sales people in this space.
What does this mean to you if you are a Ricoh equipment user?
If you are a small customer of Ricoh (fewer than 20 units) you are probably going to be serviced from this point forward by a local dealer, and if your equipment is spread across multiple regions, there is a chance you may be serviced by different dealers.
If you are a larger customer of Ricoh, you may be staying with Ricoh; however, your units may not all be serviced by Ricoh direct but rather by local dealers.
In either case, your pricing and terms should be honored. However, once the current term is up, all bets are off.
A few points to think about:
- This is the same service/sales model Xerox adopted a number of years ago. The fallout from this move was that it was difficult to put national deals into place. We expect the same here. There were also different levels of satisfaction with the service offerings from the local dealers.
- Many of the current Ricoh customers were Canon customers from IKON. Now that these customers switched to Ricoh, they are getting dropped. Will there be any fallout from these customers?
It will be interesting to see exactly how it all pans out—and as always, Mattern & Associates is here to provide further updates and support.
Update to the Ricoh layoffs as of May 25, 2017.
