Did you know …….?
Managing a subscription-based cartridge replenishment service requires the ability to anticipate when a cartridge is going to run out and act early enough so that the end customer never runs out of ink or toner in their printer.
Failure to do so could even lead to claims for compensation as evidenced by the lawsuit filed against HP in a California (USA) court for deficiencies in service delivery associated with its HP InstantInk program.
Recently a group of consumers who had subscribed to the HP Instant Ink service have filed a lawsuit against HP. While the lawsuit has yet to be admitted by a judge, it reflects the unease generated by potentially poor management of a service that is very attractive to small printer users.
HP InstantInk is a subscription-based service that allows you to print up to a maximum volume of pages per month without having to worry about cartridges, as HP commits to automatically replenish them before they run out. Hence, this is the problem that users complain about: the cartridges often don’t arrive on time and the printer is stuck.
The lawsuit says that this happens mainly for 2 reasons:
1. When the user prints a lot, the low ink or toner warning alert is generated too late to allow enough time for the reference to arrive on time and the printer stops.
2. HP runs out of stock of the reference and cannot ship the supply.
In either case, it is impossible to print because, as the lawsuit states, HP locks the printer, preventing the use of any other cartridge not shipped directly from HP, including original cartridges purchased from a retailer.
A consumables replenishment program relies on printer monitoring by HP, the service provider, to be aware of the printer’s status. But it is clearly not enough to know the printer’s status. It is also necessary to anticipate. And this is the problem that HP and many like it encounter. Since every customer has different and changing printing patterns, setting a percentage level at which to send the replacement cartridge guarantees that for many customers the printer will stop, for many others the cartridge will arrive months in advance, and for a few it will arrive about 10 days in advance, which is the optimum time.
The only way for the service provider to avoid this problem is to define the cartridge shipment threshold based on the number of days of use remaining before the cartridge runs out.
There is only one monitoring technology that works like this: Nubeprint. This technology uses an advanced predictive engine that provides individual knowledge for each cartridge and each printer on what date it will run out. Knowing what and when it will be needed to service customers’ printers make it easier to keep the right stock in the warehouse and avoid those problems that HP InstantInk customers complain about.
In this day and age where service is more important than product, it is imperative to use the right technology that allows you to differentiate and succeed without the risk of legal liability.
Source: Tonernews.com, Nubeprint