What an acquisition can do to your help desk volume

In July, ENX reported that under Loffler Companies’ deal to buy Fisher’s Technology, all of Fisher’s customer contracts, pricing, service agreements and support contacts "remain in effect with no changes." That’s exactly what a customer wants to hear, and it’s a lovely promise to make. But somebody has to keep that promise, and in our experience a lot of that work lands on the help desk.

Copier dealer acquisitions in 2026

It has been a really busy year. Fisher’s is a $50 million dealer that has been around since 1936, and Loffler, at $136 million, is one of the top 20 dealers by revenue in ENX’s rankings. Together they now cover ten states (Wisconsin all the way over to Washington). In the same ENX roundup, DEX Imaging picked up New England Copy Specialists, founded in 1965, with seven locations. Then this month The Cannata Report wrote up Image 2000, which has eight locations across California and Nevada, as DEX’s sixth acquisition of the year, which is a lot for one dealer.

Much of the coverage I’ve seen is about footprint. Locations, states, revenue, you know, the usual stuff that gets announced. Which makes sense to me, since growing the footprint is one obvious reason to do a deal. I haven’t really seen anyone write the article about what happens to the phones.

What happens to the phones

In our experience the customers call anyway, even after the letter telling them that nothing is changing. They’ll want to check if their toner order still goes to the same place, who is reading their meters now, whether the tech they know is still the one coming out. And those calls land on a desk that was already busy before the deal closed.

One dealer we work with put a number on it. They had just folded two acquisitions into the same team, and were looking at volume going up 30 to 40% the next quarter, with the same team. However, the ask for more seats usually gets a no, which is kind of the whole problem.

Advanced Office found out the hard way

ENX ran a piece in December 2024 where Elite Dealers talked about their growing pains, and Advanced Office of Irvine, California was very honest about theirs. They had acquired an MPS company, and with it came a big population of A4 devices outside their area with no dealer-supported contracts for supplies or service. So those out-of-area service calls had to go through their local dispatch first, and then somebody had to negotiate a time-and-materials call with another dealer in that part of the country. The dealer said that back and forth caused extended downtime for customers and pushed up costs in the service department. They also tried a third party that claimed national coverage, which went badly and made the customers even less happy.

One of the things they did was small. They put every out-of-area MPS customer from the deal on automated toner, so that those customers wouldn’t need to call in for it. Now, that’s a pretty boring fix.

What we’d sort out before the deal closes

If we were running the desk, here’s what we’d look at:

1. Find the calls that only exist because the customer is unsure. Toner, meter reads, "who do I call now". In our experience these are the ones that go up after a deal, and a lot of them have a right answer sitting in your ERP already.
2. Automate the ones that have a right answer. Advanced Office did it for toner. The same goes for meter reads and logging service calls, and this is where AI is actually useful. It’s what we built Auralis to do: meter reads, toner and service calls handled around the clock and written straight into e-automate.
3. Keep your people on the calls that need a person, like the customer whose machine has been down all week, or the new customer who isn’t sure about you yet.
4. Ask for the extra seats anyway. Just don’t plan the quarter around getting them.

Want to see what the next deal could do to your own desk? Put your numbers into our Service Desk ROI Calculator. It only asks for two: your inbound calls per month and the size of your dispatch and service team.

Sources

• ENX Magazine, M&A Bonanza: Loffler and Fisher’s Join Forces, DEX Imaging and Kelley Create Swing Deals, Systel Integrates, Jul 9, 2026.
• Mark Vruno, Office Technology News, September 14-18, 2026, The Cannata Report, Sep 21, 2026.
• Erik Cagle, Pain Versus Gain: Elite Dealers Address Issues Spurred by Growth, ENX Magazine, Dec 26, 2024.
• 30 to 40% volume figure: an Auralis customer (internal, anonymized).