After developing an AI voice agent to help process its own service calls, a Somerset managed print
service provider is now offering its AI expertise to other service companies across the UK
Like many business owners, Calum Smith, Managing Director of MFP and VoIP telephony provider Lanier South West, has been exploring how he can use AI within his operations to boost productivity, improve customer service and potentially create a new revenue stream.
Unusually, he and his colleagues have done this so successfully – and generated such a level of interest from existing contacts in the managed print services (MPS) industry – that Calum has now set up a separate business, AI Voice Solutions, to develop AI phone agents for services businesses in other sectors and other parts of the country.
He seems more surprised than anybody that what he describes as “a little company in the south-west” should be at the forefront of this next wave of automation. “I assumed everybody was investing in AI,” he says. “But someone in our industry told me that wasn’t the case. He said people tend to think AI is ChatGPT or Copilot and will use it for simple things like finding some very basic information or writing an email, but they’re not integrating it into their internal systems to make them better. I was surprised.
I genuinely thought the younger guys would be looking at this and doing all the running.” They haven’t been – at least not in Cheddar, Somerset – giving 56-year-old Calum Smith an opportunity to take what he has learned from developing AI for his own business out to other small businesses across the UK. Early days Lanier South West’s roots go back to 1968 when Calum’s parents, Maurice and Helen Smith, set up Norset Office Supplies in Cheddar.
In the 1970s they switched focus to electrostatic photocopiers and, in 1976, became a Sharp dealer – the first company in Somerset to specialise in plain paper copiers. In 1992, Norset adopted Lanier South West as its trading name, having entered into a partnership with the Harris/3M organisation, then known as Lanier (UK) Limited, and taken on its full range of copiers, fax machines, voice products and document management systems.
For the last 15 years, Lanier South West has majored on Toshiba devices, which now account for around 95% of its MFP sales, with Develop supplying the remaining 5%. Alongside Toshiba MFPs, Lanier South West sells complementary products like PaperCut software for schools and Foldr document management software from Selectec.
Just before Covid, it added VoIP telephony to its offering, giving it not just a new source of recurring revenue but a broader customer base to go after. “I thought that telephony business would all come from our existing copier customers, but it hasn’t. It’s come from a mix. It’s bringing in new customers, and new customers that don’t have copiers as well. And it’s allowed us to go back to existing customers that might not want a new copier and have something else to talk about,” says Calum.
Practical starting point In many respects Lanier South West is a typical, well-run, 12-person MPS provider serving a local area – the BS (Bristol), BA (Bath) and TA (Taunton) postcodes – with a core offering enhanced by sensible diversification. This begs the question: what prompted Calum to dive into the fast-moving world of AI, develop new skills in-house and then launch a whole new business with UK‑wide reach? “I saw something about AI voice on social media and my first reaction was ‘Telesales’,” he explains. “How can we use this to communicate with our customers and communicate with prospects? And how can I do that without spending more money on staffing? I had an online conversation with somebody, then went away and thought about it and, with more research, realised we could do it ourselves.”
Calum quickly decided the best starting point was not telesales but the processing of incoming service calls, where AI could help provide a better service through round-the-clock assistance and cover when someone is ill, on holiday or simply away from their desk. Over the next six months he and Lanier South West’s in-house IT expert developed an AI Voice bot fully integrated with the cloud-based Vantage Online software the company uses to manage operations, including meter readings and billing, contract administration, help desk and field service management.
This API integration, which is also configured into a text-based chatbot on Lanier South West’s website, enables the AI agent to log incoming service calls and relevant details provided by the caller straight into Vantage Online, providing an experience that Calum says is both more fluid and potentially more informative than registering a fault via Vantage Online directly. “With Vantage Online, you have to set up a login for the end user and when they log in they have to fill out a form to log a call. With our bot, people just need to provide their device’s serial number to log the call.
There’s no format to it. It’s fluid. You can also ask it for other things. If, say, you’ve got black lines on copies, it will give advice on whether it’s from the engine or whether you need to clean the glass. If you ring and ask for guidance on setting up scan to folder, it will email you a Scan to Folder guide or a video link. Soon, it will do this by text or WhatsApp as well. So, we started looking at AI voice from a service point of view, at how it could help our clients.” Assistance, not replacement Calum was clear from the outset that the AI was to assist existing staff, not replace them. Incoming service calls are still answered by Jane on the service desk.
The AI Voice agent will only kick in if Jane is away from her desk or on another call. “If you ring our service desk and Jane doesn’t answer it, it will announce that it’s an AI service and is there to support Jane, so people are completely aware of what they’re talking to. It will then ask how it can help and once the call has been logged send an email to Jane and to the customer confirming what’s been logged.
If the caller doesn’t want to talk to AI or if they decide they want to talk to a human at any time during the call, they can go back to the internal phone system. If Jane’s free, she’ll answer and if she isn’t the call will go through to her voicemail.” Calum is collecting and analysing feedback to gauge customers’ feelings about AI Voice, but from his perspective it has already proved its value by freeing up staff to deal with more complex tasks and by enabling Lanier South West to compete for tenders that require 24-hour service. “If I had to employ somebody to provide a 24-hour service or use an outside agency, how much is that going to cost me, and will they have all the knowledge we can put into the system? No, they won’t.
You’re just going to get someone answering the phone and if you do want a professional it will cost a lot of money.” Calum is currently developing additional functionality for the AI Voice agent, such as integration with the internal email system so that it can interrogate information contained there, and extending its capabilities to outbound applications so that Lanier South West can call existing customers to check if they’re happy or need anything.
“After that, it’s going to be prospecting, calling new people and asking them whether we can help them from a copy point of view, from a phone point of view and now from an AI Voice point of view as well,” he says. From in-house project to new business Associates in the print industry noticed what Calum was doing with AI, and their reactions – particularly those of BITS, provider of a device management portal for MPS providers – helped inspire the setting up of AI Voice Solutions.
“We use Vantage Online for our internal system and the BITS OneStop MPS portal for our toner monitoring. If a customer has a paper jam, it’s very simple to book a call. But if a customer rings in and says they want toner, the first reaction internally is to check when they last had one, because we find that when a customer runs out of toner they often ring us before checking whether they have a replacement in a cupboard somewhere.
“To stop the bot from sending toners out whenever one is requested, we realised we would need to interrogate OneStop to see when we last sent a toner to the client and the last time they fitted one. If we see we’ve sent one, but they haven’t fitted it yet, we can ask them to go and find it. We started talking to BITS and asked if we could have their API.
When we explained why, they expressed an interest in offering what we’ve done to MFP dealers in other parts of the country. Since then, another software company has made the same request, which got us to think about what other sectors might want it.” For commercial clarity, Calum concluded it would be better to break the association with Lanier South West and set up a separate company and website focused purely on AI Voice.
Evolving opportunities AI Voice Solutions already has about a dozen customers from diverse industry sectors, including a fish and chip shop wanting the ability to take orders and payments when staff are busy on other calls, a service provider wanting to automate service requests and warranty extensions, and a toilet hire business looking to streamline septic tank appointments.
“Whether you are serving an MPS provider or a fish and chip shop, the idea is the same,” says Calum. “You map the repetitive calls, you integrate with systems that hold the truth (the service portal, the consumables portal, the booking calendar) and you let the agent do the repetitive transactions or at least triage them so a human only takes the calls that need attention.”
Conversations with customers and the speed of change in the AI landscape are presenting further possibilities, including a transition from purely voice-based solutions (24/7 AI phone answering, intelligent appointment booking, smart call routing) to non-voice, text-based applications in process and task automation. With so much potential, Calum says the greatest challenge is maintaining focus on the present.
“The way AI is constantly changing is amazing. Sometimes I have to calm myself and say ‘hold on, let’s finish what we’re doing now before we jump on the next big opportunity’.” What started as an in-house efficiency project to capture the knowledge of a small, experienced team and make it available 24/7 has rapidly proved itself to be an effective way to defend margins, win tenders and offer better service to customers that has applications far beyond its roots in the MPS industry. Benefits for service providers
- Better customer experience: faster confirmations, self-help guidance and immediate triage.
- Operational savings: fewer unnecessary consumable shipments and reduced time on low-value calls.
- Tender competitiveness: credible, auditable 24/7 triage and logging to meet procurement requirements.
- Staff productivity: engineers and account managers spend more time on high-value tasks.
- New revenue streams: outbound prospecting, order-taking and white-label offerings for non‑print customers.
To find out more about AI Voice Solutions and how it can help improve your processes, Contact Lanier South West for a demo. Tel: 01934 742184
Or visit www.aivoicesolutions.co.uk
(Originally published in Technology reseller issue V88 by James Goulding)
