Beating the Kinko’s Competition

With the January launch of Print Online by FedEx Kinko’s, a Web-based print management tool that lets customers send documents digitally to the company’s print centers, in-plants are facing even stiffer competition. Those without a similar online ordering feature may have trouble keeping print jobs in-house.

In addition to adding a Web-based job ordering tool, here are some other tips to help in-plants compete:

• Market your services directly to departments in your organization, and stress your goal to be competitive with the local market, including Kinko’s.

• Emphasize your strength at solving customer file problems, something the folks at Kinko’s don’t usually want to spend time dealing with.

• Market your bindery capabilities and costs. Bindery isn’t normally Kinko’s strength, and the company is known for boosting its bindery costs to cover its losses on cheap black-and-white copies.

• Stress your ability to move long-run jobs to offset and save customers considerable money, something Kinko’s simply can’t do.