Industry Leader Interview

John M. Kelly, President and C.O.O. for Xerox Global Services

John Kelly has been spearheading Xerox’s charge into services and oversees Xerox’s global service development and delivery. Recently, he spoke to Ravi Mantena, Assistant Professor of CIS, about Xerox’s services strategy. Here are a few excerpts:

On Xerox’s shift in focus from products/technologies to services: “From Xerox’s perspective, the printing technology itself is increasingly getting commoditized. Therefore, we won’t be able to differentiate as much on pure technology, putting ink on paper. So we’re shifting our money away from pure technology and hardware towards more service innovation. This is not unique to Xerox, other hardware based companies are doing it too. We have to get into higher value added services where we take content, paper or digital and help knowledgeable employees and companies better utilize the content to reduce costs and add value by improving their customer experience. In the past, our services at Xerox were mostly labor based, most of the value was delivered in the technology we sold, and then labor was used to keep the technology operating. Now we are making a big shift, where significantly more value has to be added in the service component.”

To what extent does this change the way you do business at Xerox? “It changes in many important ways. We are no longer selling technologies or products, but value propositions. From a customer standpoint, people are looking for value expressed in terms of business outcomes. They are saying if we use Xerox’s printing technology, demonstrate to us that we can trim costs, improve our customer experience, and our employee productivity. So you have to be thinking more about your value propositions and customer benefits than your inputs. You can no longer be a horizontal player, you have to go vertical, with a deep understanding of the industry, the processes and applications inside the industry.”

Given Xerox’s reputation as a printing company, is it difficult for you to get your customers to listen to your story, your new value proposition? “No, not really. You do have different clients and different people within companies you are going after. In the past, we mostly dealt with someone in administrative services, the person who bought copiers or printers. Now we have to address a whole different set of people within clients’ companies, like the C.E.O.s, the C.I.O.s and also the marketing people. We can talk to the marketing folfs about how we can help them change the experience for their customers — whether they are reaching them over the Web, or through a monthly statement. We can show them the unique skills we bring to the party — skills that go well beyond printing, things such as cognitive engineering, understanding of how people consume information, etc. Even though they never interacted with us for these kinds of services in the past, they know Xerox as a world class, innovative company and they are willing to give us an ear.”

How do you innovate in services?
“You have to innovate more from a process standpoint than anything else. With products or technologies, the innovation is a lot more tangible. Here you have to constantly keep thinking of better ways to do things and add value. You look at each step, measure and collect data, measure the outcomes and learn from that to make things better. So you are constantly learning and transforming the process. It is also very important to transmit that learning across your organization. If we learn something valuable about a process in London, we can use it in Hong Kong.”

To read more of this interview, go to our web site: http://www.simon.rochester.edu/research-centers/center-for-information-intensive-services/about-the-center/index.aspx