Can you explain the CK | Office technologies strategic vision and the primary axes you plan to focus on to achieve your objectives in future years?
Our vision is to be a responsible, market-leading company for providing businesses with technological and digital support and working to improve the experience of work in an office environment by offering our clients better technologies. This office technologies section is the common thread linking up our past, present and undoubtedly future activities. As a distributor of Konica Minolta equipment since the 1980s, office printing has been our historic occupation and still remains important today, but is far from being the only thing we do: we want to continue developing products, innovative solutions and ancillary services.
Five to ten years ago, we essentially created various related departments such as audiovisual, IT and outsourcing. We have developed and highlighted these a lot over the last two years, and plan to continue doing so. By focusing on our office technologies activities, we are serving as a single point of contact for our clients via this common thread. And all whilst keeping an eye on future trends and changes, as is in our DNA: the reason why CK has been operating for 77 years is that it has been able to innovate, reinvent itself and be in the right place at the right time.
How would you rate CK’s performance in terms of its strategy, and what changes have you made recently in response to market changes?
For everything relating to office technologies, we work to ensure maximum client satisfaction across the skills, activities, products and services that our expertise covers. We also use both field data and marketing surveys to ensure that we offer the highest possible level of service. The figures speak for themselves: we are continuing to grow, despite the fact that our historical activities are very mature and we are in a very competitive market. What's more, we are seeing a downward trend in office printing, as there is more and more talk of CSR and clients are keen to reduce their carbon footprints. Nevertheless, CK still has significant potential to grow, which I would say is primarily down to two things: the quality of the products we offer, and also our after-sales services. Everything is managed from Luxembourg, with sixty multilingual staff working onsite and 26 technicians constantly out and about.
Our clients can see that we have full control of our processes. All of our departments are experiencing growth: the audiovisual department, for example, is seeing major demand for teleconferencing tools or interactive and dynamic meeting rooms, especially given the rise in remote working. Our sales department now instinctively offers all of CK’s services as a matter of course. We have also become a force for innovation: we listen to needs, test new products on the market, establish new partnerships and more. Whilst we have numerous large clients, the majority are small and medium sized business, which we aim to provide with products and solutions that enable them to take further steps towards digitalisation. We have thus created an internal innovation cell designed to determine affordable products that could help small clients achieve this.
How do you ensure that your company’s overall strategy matches the specific objectives of each department or
team?
We remain focused on our common thread of office technologies, but all of our departments operate as mini internal companies and we encourage cross-selling. In other words, every sales representative is able to assist every client, whatever their needs, and offer them our entire range of services. This ability to serve as a single point of contact allows our clients to come to us, express a functional need, and receive an answer in the form of a technical, software or equipment solution as well as an array of related services.
Read articles by other members of the management team
- The idea is to serve as our clients’ sole partner (Bernard Hugo, Partner & General Manager Services)
- We strive to be a committed company (Laure Elsen, Administrateur Délégué, Partner & General Manager Marketing & Finance)
- CK is highly prized by Konica Minolta for its expertise (Tom Frisch, Partner & General Manager Administration)