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Email Gateway ensures first-class service

With 120 home-based service engineers serving the catering industry, Service Line can offer more efficient and effective service by using a reliable and easy to use messaging system. An Autopage Email Gateway provides the essential link.

Email Gateway ensures first-class service

RUNNING a national network of 120 home-based service engineers requires a good communications system, especially when the clients they look after work in the ‘pressure cooker’ environment of the commercial catering industry.

Serviceline is the national service company for Aga Foodservice Equipment. Based in Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, its manufacturer-trained service engineers provide servicing contracts, installations, emergency services and warranty support on a wide range of market leading kitchen equipment brands to commercial catering clients nationwide. It’s a seven-day a week, same-day response service with special emergency arrangements outside normal hours.

Problem

Serviceline’s clients operate under pressure. Faced with strict regulatory standards of quality and safety, and having to meet increasingly high expectations from the markets they serve, they need to know that help is just a ‘phone call away when essential equipment goes down.

Serviceline, in turn, needs to know it can rely on a messaging system that won’t fail in an emergency – and for the past three years it has relied on the Autopage Email Gateway system.

Solution

Installed three years ago, the Email Gateway system is now so embedded in the way Serviceline operates that it has almost become part of the office furniture. “It ticks along quite happily and almost blends into the background now,” says IT Manager Kevin Sheehan. “It has a simple function but saves us a lot of time and wasted effort and we wouldn’t want to do without it.”

The Email Gateway is used for reactive messages to service engineers while they are out on the road. The engineers carry a comprehensive range of parts and have an established ordering system for spares, meeting up at pre-arranged rendezvous to collect parts from a delivery van.

Their contact numbers are stored in the system’s address book which converts email messages from administration staff at the company’s head office, into SMS text messages and sends them out.

“ All the detailed papers for jobs, which can amount to three to four pages of A4, are sent out the previous day.” says Mr Sheehan. “Then, when the engineers are out on the road, we use the Autopage system to update them on any problems arising such as emergency messages about the spares delivery vehicle, health and safety issues, changes to job details or job cancellations, phone number changes and general group messages. We can also send reminders for engineers to send in their paperwork.

“Before we had to rely on voicemail messages, emails or faxes, which frequently needed a reply from the driver. Often these messages simply didn’t get sent. Now administration staff simply pick an individual engineer’s name, or groups of names, out of the system’s address book and the message is converted into text and sent out.”

The system is easy to use and is liked by staff. The engineers don’t need to respond to the messages or stop driving in order to answer the phone and can be diverted en route if a job is cancelled. Administration staff have also vastly reduced wasted time on ‘phone calls.

“We can also alert engineers to wider problems,” Mr Sheehan said. “For example, when there was a terrorist alert, we were able to tell them immediately about major traffic problems and that the delivery van wasn’t getting through.”

The Email Gateway system also links into the company’s main computer system and will send a text message to raise the alarm if the computer system goes down during out-of-office hours. This enables a computer technician to attend to deal with the problem promptly rather than letting it run until office staff are back at work.

The Autopage Email Gateway is a pro-active system which has enhanced Serviceline’s own pro-active approach to helping its catering clients maintain optimum performance from their equipment.

 

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