IPG Visits New Ricoh Customer Experience Center

On Tuesday, IPG Editor Bob Neubauer toured the new Customer Experience Center (CEC) opened by Ricoh USA, Inc. in October. Designed to help customers and dealers experience Ricoh’s offerings first-hand, the CEC showcases technologies that empower digital workplaces: workflow automation, production printing, audiovisual communication, camera imaging and collaboration. The CEC also highlights Ricoh’s services offerings, demonstrating how workflows and solutions are implemented and integrated by Ricoh team members.

Located on the 18th floor of a New York City office building, the facility features not only Ricoh production printers, like the Pro C9110  and Pro c7110x, but also an array of Ricoh MFDs and wide-format printers. With white boards and cameras for remote collaboration, the CEC is an ideal place for dealers to collaborate with customers. The site can be easily rebranded with dealers' and customers' logos to make them feel at home. (During Neubauer's visit, the IPG logo was displayed prominently on a large screen.) The CEC was recently honored as a 2017 Experience Design & Technology Award recipient by Event Marketer magazine.

The Ricoh Pro C9110 with a great view of Manhattan's Third Avenue behind it.

“The CEC itself is a service offering in a way. We want it to be the physical avatar of our commitment to customer-centric, services-led business, enabling our customers and dealers to capitalize on our people, processes and technology,” said Glenn Laverty, Senior VP, Marketing, Ricoh Americas and President & CEO, Ricoh Canada. “We want clients who may not instinctively associate certain technologies with the Ricoh brand to experience them first-hand and to gain actionable insights that can help them uncover new ways to help improve their business with our help. We believe putting the customer at the center of it all is the best way to design and implement solutions and services, so we have invested heavily in making that happen.”

The CEC was created for Ricoh direct customers as well as customers of its Ricoh Family Group of dealers – Ricoh, Savin and Lanier. Each experience can be unique and customized based on their interest or industry. Ricoh dealers are able to customize with their logos, videos and other content to communicate key differentiators to their customers. Industry-leading Event Marketer Magazine recently announced the New York CEC as a winner of the Gold Award as part of its 2017 Experience Design & Technology Awards. The world’s largest program of its type, these awards celebrate the best-designed live experiences and the most powerful “wired” engagements delivered by brands and partners worldwide.

"Ricoh is committed to being the number one dealer provider in the industry, and the new CEC is the most recent example of that commitment,” said Jim Coriddi, VP, Dealer Division, Ricoh USA, Inc. “It’s one thing to explain your value proposition to a potential customer. Ricoh has taken it to the next level, investing in a facility that enables dealers to show customers their value within a real-world setting – as if it is their own branded showroom – and it’s a game changer.”

The CEC is the latest in a long series of investments and big shifts in the enterprise services realm from Ricoh. It is home to a diverse set of rooms that reflect a variety of potential enterprise environments, from a boardroom to a huddle room to a production print space, for both customers and dealers to help them to grow their businesses. As part of Ricoh’s commitment to serve a wide variety of customers, the space also includes a lecture hall/learning space and a “tunnel” that leverages networked projectors that allow users to interact with images projected on the walls, collaborating in real time. Visitors can see and interact with each of these realistic enterprise environments and others, all of which experts can personally design to reflect potential or planned implementations.

The NYC CEC is one of five facilities across the country that will be created or updated, enabling customers to experience Ricoh’s innovative technologies for various industries as well as in the production environment. The new CEC adds to Ricoh’s existing Customer Experience Center and Executive Briefing Center in Boulder, Colorado and others around the world specifically designed for experts within Ricoh’s Commercial & Industrial Printing (CIP) Group to collaborate alongside our production customers – commercial printers, book publishers, print service providers and enterprises of all sizes – to help solve their printing and workflow challenges.

Portions of this story came from a press release provided by a company unaffiliated with IPG. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of IPG.