We clearly recognise that service delivery is our opportunity to differentiate ourselves from the pack and we therefore work tirelessly to continuously improve our already exacting standards.

Underpinning our work is a no compromise policy on the recruitment of service personnel, both back-office and customer facing. Having secured the services of  “Arena people”, we then ensure that the quality and quantity of training delivered is unsurpassed.  This means time away from the coal face and to ensure training schedules are maintained without compromising service level agreements, we retain a staffing complement higher than normally required.

These staffing levels also allow us to deliver an average actual response to all our customers of less than 4 hours from time of call being placed to the engineer’s arrival at their premises.

However, potential customers tell us it is irrelevant how quickly an engineer turns up if he has to order the right parts to effect the repair.  For this reason the car stocks carried by our engineers are reviewed on a monthly basis to enable a first time fix rate of over 95%.

To further improve our performance, in 2006 we provided portable PC’s to our engineers to give them real-time access to our service management system.  This means that from a customer’s premises they can review a machine’s history, consult service manuals and even organise a same-day stock replenishment.  As well as delivering increased customer satisfaction and first time fix rates, it also improves our efficiency which in turn allows us to be more competitive.

Resting on our laurels is not an option and to prove this we have just invested in an 8,000 square foot operations centre adjacent to the A1/M1 link road in Leeds.  As well as relocating our warehouse and installation departments, we now have a purpose-built service training facility. Its main functions will be to train our field engineers and to develop our academy-style apprenticeship scheme introduced some years ago to produce tomorrow’s outstanding technicians.

By investing in the future, we know that our core values will be maintained.